Fuji Mountain Speedway, December 7, 2025. A precious, white-gloved Japanese man has just dropped very gently into the seat of Toyota Gazoo Racing’s new GR GT and has proceeded to absolutely rev the bejeesus out of it. Whup-blam, crackle. WHUP-BLAM, crackle. WHUP-WHUP-HISS-CRACKLE.
Sound carries in cold air, and as the third rev dies away, the 40-odd people in the pit garage all simultaneously mutter a small swear in the language of their homeland. All I can think is that the wash of hot gas from the quad of exhausts has deposited tiny bits of dead dinosaurs directly into my nose. And I really like the smell.
I really like the car, too. A low-slung missile of a thing that doesn’t so much pull up as arrive and pose—a blend of Japanese aesthetic practicality and nascent brutalism. A long-bonneted thunderstorm that pokes you in the eyes and absolutely fails to apologize. Yes, you’ll do the mental riffling through the paperwork of memory that tries to associate it with something else, but you’ll eventually discard them all. Mercedes-AMG GT, Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Viper? Sort of. But also no. It gets more interesting the more you look at it, and it’s nothing if not worth a good stare.
Headlines? It’s a two-seat, 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 with rear-wheel drive and a glancing blow from a mild hybrid system that’s small enough to barely count as electric. There’s an eight-speed automatic with paddles, tightened up with a wet-start clutch instead of a gluey torque converter, 641hp, 849Nm of torque, and 1,750kg. Although TGR is still being remarkably cagey about specifics and keeps putting brackets after everything. The power figure brackets basically said ‘or a bit more’ and the weight brackets ‘or a bit less.’
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Based on those metrics, you’re probably looking at 0–100kph in under 4sec, and although the 320kph top speed was quoted, the inevitable brackets (‘or more’) indicated that this will be a 321kph car. We’re kinda reading between the lines here, but it’s not exactly invisible ink. It’s also not that prescient to note that there’s probably quite a lot of headroom possible in those figures.
But what we’re looking at is an all-new super sports car with a bellyful of brand-new V8. Which, given the current climate, feels joyous, a bit mad and utterly wonderful, if not destined for excessive production longevity. It’s also not a special, or limited-run, and likely to be priced in the realms of other cars a bit like this—think obvious stuff like that Mercedes-AMG GT, or various Porsche products—and therefore sits quite comfortably in the ‘possible’ range of achievable aspiration.
This is our first experience of the car here in Japan, and there’s a lot to take in. Especially because nobody was really expecting anyone to just get in the car and bang it off the limiter. Still, you can mine the experience, and I’m turning over all the rocks I can find. So, the noise. TGR insists that the pops and bangs are natural, but they’re so syncopated that they actually sound a bit fake.
Saying that, it’s got a weirdly raw, bluesy rasp when revved, the usual offbeat V8 burble higher and more mid-chest than low bass, and it sounds more race car than old-school American eight-cylinder. It also gains and drops revs a bit like a four-pot—not perfectly zingy, but more accurate-sounding than some big-capacity turbo cars that fall out of higher rpms like they can’t be bothered. And no, it’s not the heart-in-mouth sound that the OG LFA’s V10 used to make the hairs on the back of your neck snap to attention, but that’s the world we’re living in.
It is, however, very much alive, with the rest of the technical specifications verging on the simplified. Because the Toyota GR GT seems absolutely stone-cold-focused on nailing the fundamentals rather than the tinselly bits. So, there’s an aluminum spaceframe underneath, supported by a swathe of CFRP (carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic) bolt-ins. The hood, roof, inner door skins, rear bulkhead, and trunk lid, plus a few bonus bits, are all carbon-fiber adjacent. The rest is aluminum. So this is a cheaper, more mass-producible way of getting—almost—the strength and rigidity of a carbon tub, and also Toyota’s first go at this kind of architecture.
It’s low—the hood is just above knee height if you’re six feet tall—a couple of meters wide, and very cab-rear. And here’s where the packaging gets interesting, because TGR seems wonderfully obsessed with center of gravity and raw balance. The V8 sits so far back as to have the front of the block a few inches aft of the front-axle centerline (hence it’s very much front/mid-engined and likely to keep your knees warm), buried as far down as it’ll possibly go and dry-sumped. There’s a structural carbon torque tube that carries the driveshaft back toward the rear wheels, feeding into the front of the eight-speed auto.
Although it first engages with a small electric motor that props up torque losses during hard acceleration and gear changes, it’s small enough that it’s not going to move the car about on full electric power. But to keep the rear of the car compact, the drive then exits the back of the ’box into a set of conical gears that punch another driveshaft back left and forwards, through a limited-slip diff and out to the rear wheels.
Weirdly, for a car so obsessed with keeping everything so low, the battery pack for the e-motor sits quite high in the profile above the ’box, but apparently, the battery is so small and the overall roll center so grounded that it was deemed acceptable.
Four-wheel drive possibilities? Well, everything is possible if you throw enough money at it, but looking at the packaging on this car, it’d be a massive hassle. There’s also a distinct lack of active aero—Toyota citing added complication and higher center of gravity, as well as the fact that the GR has all the aero and cooling functionality that it needs. Which is interesting in itself. No downforce figures have been given. Not even with brackets.
The driver and the passenger sit well back and down, staring out over an absolute plane of hood, the suspension electrically damped but otherwise just double-wishbones and coils all around, supporting 20-inch lightweight wheels and Michelin Cup 2 tires with the usual dinner-plate-sized Brembo carbon-ceramics. Which again, feels pared back. It’s not inferior, but where manufacturers seem keen on adaptive and ‘intelligent’ suspension systems and PR-able moments, this is straightforward. It’s got a nose lift—there’s a button on the center console that no one mentioned—but that’s about it.
Similarly, inside it’s restrained. Ignore the intestinal red leather, and you’ve got a pair of carbon buckets with individual padding, excellent ergonomics when posting up toward the pedals, and a flat-bottomed wheel. There’s a digital dash up front with big shift lights and gear display icons, a couple of rotary controls on the bottom of the wheel—the right-hand side for the four drive modes, the left-hand side for traction control severity, just a little label that says ‘Expert,’ and a plus and minus. Though it’s not clear which way you rotate depending on how expert you might be feeling.
Other than that, there’s a big transmission tunnel shrouding the driveline, a small paddle for gear engagement, and a relatively modest touchscreen in the middle. And yes, there are physical switches underneath for often-used functions. Pre-production prototype? It feels real, and sorted and quality, not even close to science fiction. There’s nothing in here that even hints at unnecessary gizmos. To be honest, it could actually probably do with a couple of theatrical flourishes, but it feels likeable and honest. Although the cupholders are in a really daft place behind your elbows.
So, it’s all gravy as far as desperately wanting to have a go, but there are more than a few arguments going on about what this car actually represents. There are hints of LFA in the styling (think mini buttressed intakes on the top of the rear wings and triangular cutouts on the hood), but it’s actually more than that. In fact, Toyota has explicitly indicated that this car follows in the intellectual footsteps of the ’60s 2000GT and the original LFA, making the whole ‘new LFA’ argument slightly muddy.
It’s called ‘Shikinen Sengu’ in Japanese. A tradition in which a Shinto temple is periodically rebuilt every couple of decades to represent eternal renewal (‘Tokowaka’) and the passing down of ancient craftsmanship. The reference? Toyota keeps referring to the transfer of generational knowledge, the ‘secret sauce’ of car building, from the engineers who created the original LFA to the new guys, a strangely incongruous phrase for a Japanese company to employ. But it makes the point that truly great cars have that extra little something that can’t be found down the back of the coding sofa. Data doesn’t drive the smile on your face, or the look back when walking away—emotion does.
The slightly confusing bit here is that while the world was waiting for a new LFA, Toyota has actually birthed...two. The GR GT feels more like a literal successor—combustion-engined, rear-driven, two-seat supersports with utterly Japanese sensibilities—while the Lexus LFA Concept becomes the intellectual son, sporting more involved and forward-thinking tech, more expense and sophistication.
One is the everyman thrasher enhanced by a real-world racing car program, while the other is the cultured science experiment. But whichever way you look at it, Toyota isn’t just talking about this stuff—it’s actually doing it. Bringing the drama back into the lineup, being brave, exciting, and V8-powered. And we’re absolutely here for it.
More photos of the Toyota GR GT:
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
