What Happened To The Toyota GR Super Sport?

It’s hard to argue that switching its top class of racing to the Hypercar ruleset has been nothing short of a success for the World Endurance Championship. The on-track product is better than ever, its fan popularity seems to only be increasing, and it’s as though every manufacturer under the sun wants to be a part of it.

We already have Toyota, Ferrari, Peugeot, Alpine, BMW, Cadillac, Aston Martin and Porsche. Soon joining those will be Genesis, Ford and McLaren.

When the ruleset was first confirmed in 2018, though, the intention was for those cars to be based on homologation production vehicles. That would have seen at least 25 built in the first year a manufacturer entered the series, rising to 100 for the second.

It didn’t take long for those rules to change, and, as such, we’ve only seen one Le Mans Hypercar based on a road car to date – the Aston Martin Valkyrie, and that wasn’t explicitly designed to become a race car.

That should’ve been two, though, with Toyota having made plans to release a car using the powertrain of its two-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winning-GR010. But what happened?

The start: Toyota GR Super Sport Concept

Early in 2018, when Toyota was in the midst of launching Gazoo Racing as a serious performance car brand, it showed off a pretty spectacular concept – the GR Super Sport.

Here was a road-going hypercar borrowing a lot of inspiration from the TS050 LMP1 car, Toyota’s final of that particular ruleset. That included its bubble-like cockpit, wheel arch cut-outs exposing the front tyres, gigantic rear wing and a huge rear fin.

More than that, though, it used the 2.4-litre turbocharged V6 hybrid system from the TS050. Unhinged from racing regulations, Toyota said it produced 986bhp.

Note this was before the LM Hypercar rules were confirmed, and at this stage, there wasn’t any real mention of plans for production.

Then, 2019 came, and we got excited…

The start of the Hypercar era

With the new Hypercar ruleset confirmed, Toyota revealed it would be continuing to race. It committed to building a homologation road car, too, which would be a production version of the GR Super Sport Concept.

Things went a little quiet on that front until the Covid-delayed 2020 24 Hours of Le Mans, taking place in September of that year.  Toyota rocked up to the race with the GR Super Sport. Not the concept, but a development version of the road-going hypercar – and we had a lot to ponder.

For a start, it now had headlights and wing mirrors. The bonnet’s exposed arches were now closed off, a slightly more kerb-friendly looking front splitter and the gigantic scoop on the engine cover feeding air into the rear. Oh, and curiously, it had no roof.

This wasn’t a static display, either, with the GR Super Sport completing a handful of demonstration laps in the lead up to the race.

At this stage, it was unclear what sort of performance was hiding under the skin. The GR010 and its new 3.5-litre V6 hybrid setup had yet to be revealed, and it was widely believed to still be using the earlier 2.4-litre setup of the TS050.

Excited we were. All we had to do now was wait for the production version to come along.

So, what happened?

In August 2021, it had emerged that the development of the Toyota GR Super Sport had been brought to a sudden halt.

Publications in Japan reported that a test mule had been involved in a serious crash at Fuji Speedway, catching fire in the process. Toyota never officially commented on those reports, but silence spoke volumes in the case – it was clear production had been quietly cancelled.

It’s unlikely we’ll ever truly know what happened to the Toyota GR Super Sport development mule, and it's even less likely we’ll ever see a road-going Gazoo hypercar, with the moment seemingly passed. We will always be quite sad about it, though.