From Ivan Stewart’s Baja-winning off-road trucks to the monstrous Toyota Eagle MkIII, this collection chronicles nearly 70 years of Toyota racing history.
Toyota’s motorsports resume is a lot longer than you might expect. Long before Gazoo Racing was stamping GR badges onto Corollas, Supras, and the occasional RAV4, Toyota was racing across the Australian Outback, battling American muscle cars in IMSA, and building some of the most successful prototype racers ever to cross the finish line.
Near the Toyota Experience Center in Plano, Texas, the automaker has gathered an impressive collection of vehicles from its racing past. There’s a little bit of everything here: a 1957 Toyopet Crown that helped launch Toyota’s international racing ambitions, a legendary desert-racing pickup, a Le Mans prototype packing 1000 horsepower, and even a few cars from more recent spec series.
Here’s a look at some of the machines that helped build Toyota’s motorsports legacy at the new GR Garage Experience Center.
From the moment you walk into Toyota’s GR Experience Center, it’s obvious nearly every inch of this place has been curated to celebrate the brand’s motorsports history. Racing memorabilia, suspension components, and die-cast cars decorate the walls and many office rooms at the unassuming facility. It’s equal parts museum and shrine that honors the Japanese company’s obsession with racing.
Toyota’s international motorsports career began not with a World Rally car, but with this. In 1957, a Toyopet Crown entered the Mobilgas Round Australia Rally, an extraordinarily demanding endurance event covering thousands of miles of Australia's unforgiving landscape.
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