The New Toyota TR010 Has Unfinished Business At Le Mans

Toyota’s dominance at the 24 Hours of Le Mans has been interrupted for the last three years with the return of Ferrari to top-level endurance racing, and the Japanese brand, it seems, isn’t taking that upset lying down. After five years and two wins at the world’s most famous endurance race, it’s retiring its GR010 Le Mans Hypercar and introducing a heavily updated version: meet the Toyota TR010.

Let’s explain the name change first. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear given that Toyota’s Gazoo Racing motorsports and performance division is now a globally recognised name, the company is dropping that branding from its European R&D centre that handles its World Endurance Championship efforts, renaming it Toyota Racing. This seems to be part of a wider change that’s seeing the ‘Toyota’ name dropped from Gazoo Racing in an effort to establish it as more of a standalone brand, something we’ve already seen in the GR GT, which features no Toyota branding anywhere.

That explains the ‘TR’ thing, then, regardless of how much it might bring to mind smokey old Triumph sports cars. What else has changed? There’s a new front end design, bringing the car more in line with some of Toyota’s latest road cars like the C-HR+ and new RAV4, and there’s a fancier back end too with a full-width light bar, which should make it easier to identify in the inky blackness of the Mulsanne Straight at 2am. Oh, and it’s all wrapped up in a new red and white livery heavily inspired by the one worn by the legendary GT-One in the late ’90s. Excellent.

That’s about all we know so far. All signs point to the TR010 being a heavily updated GR010 rather than a whole new car, so we expect it to use the same 3.5-litre twin-turbo V6 hooked up to a hybrid system.

Will all this be enough for Toyota to reclaim the endurance crown from Ferrari? We’ll have to wait and see – the World Endurance Championship may have waved goodbye to top-flight efforts from Lamborghini and Porsche, but with Genesis joining the fray this year and Ford and McLaren in 2027, the competition’s not about to get any easier. 

We’ll see the TR010 run in anger for the first time on 22 March, when the WEC’s Prologue test session kicks off at the Losail Circuit in Qatar, before the first round proper begins at the same venue on 26 March.