Now that Toyota is a dominant name in WEC, the racing development and new “go-fast” technology is starting to spill out into their road cars. We’ve already seen some more aggressive styling on new cars, particularly the Camry and Avalon (which we will discuss in an upcoming article). It seems Toyota is using their time in WEC while, everyone else is pulling out for electric, to develop their hybrid technology. The Toyota GR Super Sport (which we talked about in our Tokyo Auto Salon article) hints at a future where Ferrari and Mclaren might be seeing competition from the makers of the Prius.

On top of the LMP1-styled GR Super Sport Concet, the highly anticipated successor to the Supra is expected to make an appearance in concept form this year. We’ve already seen the capability of Toyota to make a viable sports car with their GT86, although it sported a Subaru flat-four engine. It will be interesting to see how Toyota moves forward developing their own performance engines. The GR Super Sport concept featured a 2.4L twin-turbo V6 paired with a hybrid powertrain.

“develop sports cars from active race cars”

Now that Toyota have fully fledged teams in WRC (World RallyCross) and WEC (World Endurance Championship), they have plans to put some of their racing development and technology into their road vehicles.

The big question isn’t whether Toyota can make a sports car or not. We fully believe they can. The questions is how their sports cars will be able to achieve the goals they set for it. For example, if they set out to make a hardcore racing car that happens to be road legal, they will have to make it at a low enough price point that it’s reasonable for people to buy it. Otherwise, they might find themselves competing with the Valkyrie and other hardcore racers, which might not fare so well for a mass producer of consumer cars.

If there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that any supercar or even sports car Toyota hopes to make in the future, it will feature hybrid power. It would almost be stupid not to. After all, they are the first major player in the hybrid space. It will be interesting to see what new technologies in Hybrid power Toyota is able to come up with.