Ashley Oldfield – our in-house race ace – puts a GR Yaris Cup race car through its paces in an attempt to break the Toyota over the course of a 9-hour endurance race.
Endurance racing has unique requirements in terms of reliability. You need parts that have been tested to exhaustion under racing conditions… Le Mans teams are renowned for completing multiple 30-hour tests throughout the year before entering cars in the 24-hour race. For example, unique suspension parts are required to deal with the bumps and high-G cornering loads. Before an event like the Killarney 9-Hour, every mechanical component on a race car usually gets replaced with something endurance-rated, well, except on our Toyota GR Yaris, which we raced in almost stock form (bar some heavy-duty brake pads).
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Our GR Yaris has had a hard life
In 2021, the Toyota GR Yaris was launched in limited numbers and, as is customary when a manufacturer wants publicity for its new model, a few units were put into the media fleet. Media cars – especially of the performance variety – get treated rather harshly. Every publication has (or wants) to test a media car’s maximum abilities on every drive, so these test units live their lives at 100% every time they are fired up.
After their time in the media fleet, test units are usually sold off as demos or kept as fleet cars, but for 2022, Toyota South Africa Motors (TSAM) decided to turn 6 of its GR Yarises into race cars. Why? So seasoned motoring journos, including me, could race each other in the single-make GR Yaris Cup.
To prepare the Toyotas for competition, each car’s seats were removed, Dunlop semi-slicks were fitted, a roll cage was installed and the brake hoses and fluid were uprated to deal with the increased pressure of racing. After that, the GR Yarises were thrown at every circuit in the country, where they took taking part in the Extreme National Race Series, along with Global Touring Cars, Polo Cup and Formula Ford.
They survived a few bumper bashings along the way, plus endured thousands of snap gearchanges and corner-cutting bumps. They lived to tell the tale at the end of the season with almost no mechanical issues (there were some overzealous shifters in the group that may have ground 4th gear too often).
Just when the GR Yarises thought they had been put out to pasture in the lovely life of day-to-day use, they were recalled for duty in the Killarney 9-Hour, which would prove their toughest test yet.
How a standard Yaris copes with 9 hours of racing
You obviously don’t just race the 9-Hour and that’s it – there are multiple practice sessions leading up to the event that serve to get the drivers’ eyes in, but also continue to shift wear and tear onto every component as it’s all done at racing speed.
Cars were breaking down all around us during the practices. Some caught fire, some drove into each other on track, some drove into each other in the pit lane, some drove into pedestrians in the pit lane (fortunately, a mild butt-slapping from a wing mirror was the extent of the damage), while our GR Yaris managed to avoid everything bar the need for fuel. And all of this was still just in the practice sessions.
Watch: GR Yaris vs Golf 8 GTI
Come race day we lined up 31st and 32nd in our virtually standard GR Yaris race cars. There isn’t really any limitation on what can enter an event like the 9-Hour so there were plenty of fast, endurance-tested race cars out there, such as the GT3 category cars, including the Audi R8 GT3 and Lamborghini Huracan GT3, a few Ginettas driven by ex-F1 drivers, Porsche GT3 Cup cars and myriad open-top sportscars.
Indeed, the pair of GR Yarises were some of the slowest cars on track, but everybody knows that it’s a game of “the tortoise and the hare” over the course of a 9-hour endurance race.
The two GR Yaris race cars were piloted by a media lineup in the 33 car (including me) and a TSAM executive and ex-racing driver lineup in the 95 car.
I qualified the 33 car and was behind the ‘wheel for the start of the race; I completed a 90-minute stint in searing heat (30° Celsius) while battling with multiple Lexus V8-powered Cobras. I also thought it would be wise to run with no aircon during the stint for the purpose of making significant fuel savings (most endurance cars have aircon as the drivers tend to cook in 4 layers of fireproof gear and crash helmet).
However, it turned out that switching off the aircon made little difference to the stint length… In fact, that had more to do with the ambient temperature, because when track conditions cooled later in the race, we could run for close to 2 hours on our 80-litre tank (we ran a 40-litre reserve tank in the car).
At the end of my first stint, the 33 car had climbed from 31st to 16th overall and was running 5th in its class. So, I handed it over to the next drivers and hoped the positive climb up the field would continue.
It may have been December in Cape Town, but rain began pelting down a few hours before sunset. In the calm hands of Mark Jones from The Citizen, our GR Yaris lapped consistently, avoided incidents and gave no trouble we couldn’t manage. We did see a warning that the car’s all-wheel-drive system was overheating (the GR Yaris was temporarily 2WD), but after a few laps, the 4WD thankfully re-engaged.
A road car’s all-wheel-drive system probably isn’t meant to distribute power up and down the driveline so often for hour upon hour, so that that was our only problem was still impressive. Considering that our lap times would only drop by a few seconds a lap and by the end of the race, we were able to lap at reasonably similar times in 4WD and 2WD as the track yielded so much grip after the rain cleared up.
Thomas Falkiner of TimesLive and Jeanette Kok-Kritzinger of Wiele2Wiele both completed their stints without any problems and it was up to me to complete the daunting final (2-hour) run to the finish.
The rhythm of the night
Due to the overcast conditions, darkness rolled in earlier than expected and the last hour and a half of the race was run in the dark. At that point, more cars seemed to career off the track because braking points were no longer visible, the cars behind you were no longer distinguishable and neither were the closing speeds with which they approached. In other words, you were never sure whether it was a flying Audi R8 or BMW M3 coming up behind you, all you saw were massive lights in your rear-view mirror.
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In such conditions, overtaking – and being overtaken – comes with heightened risk, because you’re never sure what’s ahead of you or what car may have spun and could be stranded offline (it would be so easy to steam into its side). A few cars spun off and got trapped in the gravel during the final hour, after which they’d require assistance to get going again; meanwhile, our consistent GR Yaris piled on the laps.
As we crossed the line at 9:15 pm, we had completed 314 laps of Killarney in 9 hours of hard racing. One precautionary change of brake pads for each car was the only mechanical replacement from the start of the weekend – a testament to the reliability of the little Toyota.
We finished 8th overall and 3rd in class, but the real honours were taken in the Index of Performance, where the GR Yarises finished 1st and 2nd as the most consistent cars over the course of the 9-Hour.
Apart from performing my duties as Cars.co.za’s content manager in 2022, I experienced an incredible year of racing. I raced the GR Yaris to championship honours with a round to spare and was rewarded with an outing in a GTC Corolla in SA’s premier circuit racing series. Let’s see what’s in store for 2023.
Related content:
Drive to Revive Ep3: How NOT to drive a GR Yaris
Drive to Revive Ep2 – We Race in the World’s first GR Yaris Cup
Drive to Revive Ep1: The start of the Toyota GR Yaris Cup
Mandla Mdakane – South Africa’s GTC Racing Driver shares his story
