Toyota Gazoo Racing: Why On Earth Is It Called That?

We wax lyrical pretty often about Toyota Gazoo Racing at Car Throttle. Can you blame us, though?

When you’re producing cars like the GR Yaris and GR86, blessing us with the Supra and giving the rest of the world the highly-rated GR Corolla, it’s well deserved in our opinion.

For all its brilliance in making road cars, though, and success in pretty much every form of motorsport it touches, there’s one thing pretty baffling about Gazoo Racing. Where on earth does that name come from? Well, its origins are unsurprisingly unconventional.

What does Gazoo actually mean?

It’s not a case of someone at Toyota being a Flintstones superfan and deciding to name a new performance division as a tribute to The Great Gazoo, but rather, it’s derived from the Japanese word for picture.

Even more perplexed? Well, to explain it more, we need to zip back to the 1990s and the era of the internet being a thing you’d struggle to load a 46kb image on.

Toyota planned to set up its own online sales platform for used cars, revolutionising the medium by using pictures to advertise them. The English pronunciation of the Japanese word ‘gazo’ was used for this new platform, leading to Gazoo.com

Makes sense. But how did that end up becoming a racing team name?

For that, let’s fast travel to 2007, when the internet became laced with images of lolcats.

A team of student drivers and mechanics would be heading to the 2007 Nürburgring 24 Hours. Oh, and among them to take a stint, none other than Akio Toyoda, then-vice president of Toyota and now its chairman.

Put together alongside the chief test driver of Toyota, Hiromu Naruse, the pair were forbidden from labelling this outfit as a Toyota-branded works team, so they had to get creative. That used car website was taken as unlikely inspiration, and ‘Team Gazoo’ was born.

From 2009 on, Toyota’s efforts at the N24 got factory recognition and pro drivers, but Gazoo Racing lived on as the team name. In 2015, Toyota unified all its racing efforts under the Gazoo banner.

Strange. So what about the road cars?

Well, the easy explanation is that it made marketing sense for Toyota to begin using its motorsport team name as a byword for its performance cars – and it sounded a lot more enticing than Toyota Racing Developments, to be brutally honest. From the GR Supra in 2019, it’s become the de facto for its fast stuff.

However, the first GR-branded road car came in 2009 with – of all things – the iQ GRMN. Standing for ‘Gazoo Racing Meister of Nürburgring’, it was a direct link to its efforts racing in the N24 for several niche high-performance models.

GRMN appeared on multiple JDM-only cars until 2018, with the Yaris GRMN coming to Europe and marking the first time a Gazoo-branded car found an official way outside of Japan.