Toyota’s Special Le Mans Livery Is Giving Us Gran Turismo 2 Nostalgia

We’re a little over a month away from one of the most stacked editions of the 24 Hours of Le Mans ever, with no fewer than eight major OEMs going for glory in the top Hypercar class. Not to be forgotten among the masses, Toyota – the only major manufacturer to have been there since the very beginning of the new regulations – is running one of its cars in a special livery to mark 40 years since it first ran at Le Mans, and it’s a doozy.

Toyota first entered the hallowed round-the-clock race in 1985, and continued showing up every year until 1999, scoring a second-place finish in 1992 with the howling V10-powered TS010 Group C racer.

Although it spent the first decade of the 2000s absent from the race as a constructor, it returned in the then-top LMP1 class in 2012 with the hybrid TS030. Since then, it’s seen fairly staggering success at Le Mans, winning every year between 2018 and 2022 (albeit without much competition from other big-budget manufacturers).

Although its rivals have swelled in number since then and it’s lost out to Ferrari at the last couple of editions of Le Mans, it’s still won the last three manufacturers’ titles in the wider World Endurance Championship with its GR010 Hypercar.

There’s a lot of history for Toyota to pick from to celebrate its 40th anniversary at the race, then, but it’s unsurprisingly turned to arguably its most iconic contender of all: the GT-One. Developed for the theoretically production-based GT1 rules in the late 1990s, Toyota spotted a loophole that essentially allowed it to develop a bespoke prototype, building a single roadgoing car for homologation. The company even convinced Le Mans’ organisers that the road car’s fuel tank counted as luggage space.

Although it never won the race, managing a best finish of second in 1999 (by which point it had been reclassified as a prototype), the GT-One quickly became a legend. That was in part thanks to the way it so flagrantly skirted around the rules, and partly because of Gran Turismo 2, where the 1998-spec GT-One was one of the fastest cars in the game.

It’s that car, with its tiger-striped red and white Esso livery, that Toyota has turned to for inspiration. At Le Mans this year, the #7 GR010, driven by Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Nyck de Vries, will wear the throwback colour scheme. The number #8 car, meanwhile, will carry a special livery of its own, although it’s just a subtly different version of the squad’s current matt black scheme.

We’ll find out if these special schemes will spur the manufacturer on to a sixth Le Mans victory when the race takes place between 14 and 15 June. In the meantime, though, more one-off throwback liveries, please. Peugeot 9X8 decked out in the ultra-nostalgic Peugeot Talbot Sport colours, anyone?