Toyota is rebranding its motorsport operations, beginning with its European research and development centre and subsidiary Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe that is now known as Toyota Racing, effective January 7.
Headquartered in Cologne, Germany, Toyota Racing will therefore be the name under which the firm conducts its factory-entered endurance sports racing programme in the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC), which it will enter in the upcoming 2026 season with the updated TR010 Hybrid Hypercar.
According to the Japanese manufacturer, Toyota Racing “supports Toyota’s technological development in the long term through cutting edge motorsports technology”. Toyota Racing will also support Gazoo Racing with the supply of engines for rally cars and with the production of GT4-class race cars.
The updated TR010 Hybrid Hypercar from Toyota Racing is visibly revised from its predecessor, the GR010 Hybrid that was unveiled in 2021 and which went on to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans that year and subsequently in 2022.
Here, the front end of the TR010 Hybrid has been restyled to wear a sharper look with horizontally oriented headlamps and a full-width band joining each DRL arrangement, designed to more closely mimic those of Toyota’s production cars, compared with the vertically-oriented headlamps of the GR010 Hybrid. In this debut form, the TR010 Hybrid wears a red-and-white livery that harks back to the Toyota GT-One (TS020) of 1998.
Toyota Racing will head into their top-flight prototype endurance racing of the 2026 season with a familiar driver line-up, comprised of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries piloting car number 7, while Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa will be tasked with driving car number 8.
At the same time, Toyota Gazoo Racing has been renamed Gazoo Racing for rallying and customer motorsport programmes, the latter with the GR Yaris Rally2 and GR Supra GT4. Gazoo Racing also becomes a separate sub-brand for high-performance models, such as the GR GT road car and GR GT3 racer, both notably shorn of Toyota branding.
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