There are brand ambassadors, and then there’s Jari-Matti Latvala, current principal of the Toyota WRC team and former Toyota WRC driver. The 39-year-old Finn isn’t just on the Toyota payroll, he lives and breathes the brand, and he still owns the AE86 Corolla GT he drove as a teenager, as well as the later Corolla WRC.
We meet in a WRC service park, not to talk about the new Yaris WRC, but his collection of 1980s and ’90s rally-spec Celica GT-Four and Celica Turbos; Latvala owns the full set of these 2.0-litre turbocharged and all-wheel-drive Group A cars, with which Toyota achieved six WRC world titles.
For 2025, Latvala is set to reduce his team principal commitments while tackling a full season of the FIA European Historic Rally Championship (EHRC) in a Celica ST185 Group A car. It will even be prepped by his own business, JML–Sports, and run in Toyota Gazoo Racing colours – timely, given Toyota vice president Hiroki Nakajima confirmed the return of a new Celica at Rally Japan in November.
A change to the FIA’s Appendix K regulations means cars produced between 1991 and 2000 are now eligible in the EHRC, meaning both Group A and early WRC models can compete in the 10-round championship.
“This is especially nice for me,” says Latvala. “I was born in ’85, so the years ’92 to ’96 were the old Group A cars. It was something really exciting.’
The Celica ST165 arrived in 1988, when Lancia was dominating with its Integrale, but it didn’t take long for Toyota to mount a challenge. In fact, Carlos Sainz’s 1990 WRC title with Toyota was the first ever for a non-European maker.
“I have two of those cars,” Latvala says. “The first is a customer-spec rally car that I bought from the original owner in Sweden, and he bought it from former team boss Ove Andersson when Toyota Team Europe was based in Germany. We also have another factory car that my father [also named Jari] has been using. Carlos Sainz drove it in the 1990 San Remo rally, where he finished third, and then Mats Jonsson won Rally Sweden with it in 1992.
But it’s his ST185 that Latvala will be campaigning next season. Originally driven by Sainz, Didier Auriol, and Juha Kankkunen (the stand-outs of a highly varied driver roster), the ST185 is the most successful of the three Celicas, responsible for the 1992 WRC Drivers’ title as well as the ’93 and ’94 Drivers’ and Manufacturers’ crowns.
Introduced for 1992, the ST185 is largely similar to the ST165 and most obviously differentiated by a bonnet vent to help keep intake temperatures down. But for Latvala, the updated car that arrived for 1993 is The One.
“They homologated completely new suspension,” explains Latvala. “We call it the aluminium suspension, because it’s lighter and there are more chances to play with the geometry. You can get the car lower and make a better balance, to get the car behaving more like a race car on tarmac.
“But it doesn’t have the lateral grip or the aerodynamics of the modern cars. My co-driver [Jani Hussi] for the Lahti [Historic Rally] had just been in the new Yaris Rally 2, and she said the Celica was like dancing in comparison – it basically goes on the top of the road, it’s much more loose, but it’s good fun!’
Latvala also owns an ST205, which arrived for 1994 and is most identifiable by the switch from pop-up headlights of its predecessors to four fixed lights. He describes it as the black sheep of the family on account of issues with front suspension geometry.
More significantly, the ST205 was also disqualified in 1995 for use of an illegal turbo restrictor while Juha Kankkunen was leading the WRC championship – an indiscretion that opened the door to a first WRC title for the Subaru Impreza and Colin McRae.
All of Latvala’s rally cars are prepared at his JML-Sports workshop in Tuuri, Finland, which also caters to customer requests.
Founded following the end of his full-time WRC driving career in 2019, JML-Sports today has four full-time employees. All sandblasting, welding, and fabrication is tackled in-house, while the firm can also handle engine and transmission projects, depending on customer requests. Paintwork and rollcage fabrication is outsourced, the latter requiring a special licence to meet FIA approval.
For EHRC events, mechanical specification must be identical to rally cars of the period, with the caveat that safety features such as the rollcage, seat, and fuel tanks can be upgraded to more robust modern equivalents.
“You really pay respect to those original cars, and that is what the fans want,” says the Finn, who recalls a Mk2 Escort being disqualified when scrutineers discovered electric power steering.
Sourcing period-correct parts is a challenge, but Latvala reveals his position as team principal can come with advantages. “The Celica ST185 has the intercooler on top of the engine, and you have another cooler at the front of the car, the water-cooling system. Denso was supplying the pumps for that in period [and still remains a Toyota WRC partner] and they were able to find two brand-news ones. They said, ’These are the last existing, there are no more!‘.”
Despite the care, attention, and money he has clearly lavished on these projects, Latvala does not intend to hold back on the rally stages.
“These cars have about 370 to 400bhp, which is very nice, and they are a bit more difficult to drive than, for instance, the Rally 2 Yaris, but I like the challenge and I want to push like Juha [Kankkunen] was pushing in the 1990s, not be like a gentleman driver,” he grins.
Latvala describes the four-time world champion as “my idol,” so it’s fitting that part of the reason he can now step back from running Toyota’s works WRC team is because Kankkunen himself has been appointed Toyota Gazoo Racing’s WRC deputy team principal.
Latvala never did win the WRC title, but winning the EHRC in a car once driven by his childhood hero would surely rank right up there – especially for someone who lives and breathes it like he does.
