Goo-Net Find Of The Week: A Hardcore Toyota GRMN Yaris

Welcome back to Goo-Net Find of the Week, a series in which we pretend we’re not procrastinating on a Friday afternoon by idly browsing the coolest online used car platform in the world, Japan’s Goo-Net Exchange.

For this week’s perusal of Japan’s ever-fascinating used car market, we’ve once again got Toyota’s GR performance models on the brain. Might be something to do with that one car that was unveiled this morning.

Thankfully, it looks like the GR GT is set to be sold globally, albeit probably in not huge numbers, but as we’ve already seen, that’s not always a given with GR cars. Take the GRMN Yaris – not the one from 2018, which was based on the regular Yaris and did come to Europe in small numbers, but the one from 2022, essentially a more hardcore version of the GR Yaris.

That hardcore-ification meant getting rid of the (pretty useless) back seats and fitting a carbon bonnet for a 20kg weight reduction, replacing said seats with a roll cage, dropping and widening the car by 10mm, and fitting a close ratio transmission, which Toyota said it developed through repeated “breaking and fixing.” Which is one way of doing things. It was also treated to a pair of rather tasty-looking bucket seats. There was no extra power from the G16E 1.6-litre turbo triple, which at this point was still in its original 268bhp guise, but torque did increase by 20lb ft to a figure of 288.

Limited to 500 units, it was a Japan-only affair, and available in two different packages – Circuit and Rally. It’s the former we’ve got here, which means it additionally has a set of bespoke lightweight BBS wheels, adjustable Bilstein shocks and a smattering of extra aero, including that sizeable rear wing.

It’s the cheapest GRMN Yaris currently on Goo-Net, although at ¥7,419,000 – around £35,800 – it’s not the absolute bargain that some JDM performance heroes seem to be on the site. Then again, it’s only covered an indicated 11,420km – just under 7100 miles – so it’s not exactly leggy. Consider the fact that the back-on-sale-in-limited-quantities GR Yaris Aero Performance will currently set you back almost £49,000 in Britain, and the much more hardcore GRMN starts to look like pretty good value, even with the cost of importing it and registering it in the UK.

Good enough to be worth it? We’ll let you decide. But for a clean example of one of the best performance cars in recent memory, and a rare groove JDM special at that, we can’t help but think it might be. If nothing else, it’s a lot less than the GR GT is likely going to cost.