A few years back, we reported that Lexus had been working on replacing the LFA and the Lexus RC F with a more translatable car to GT racing. They managed to coax the current RC F into workability as a GT3 race car, but the original was really never built for motorsports. Toyota’s racing arm, Toyota Gazoo Racing, unveiled a Lexus GR GT3 Concept back in 2022, and said at the time that the entire raison d’être of Gazoo was to skunkwork from racing to road, rather than to try to retrofit road to racing. Well, now we’ve just seen what that means in the form of a camouflaged mule racing around Laguna Seca. We don’t know a ton about what that means in terms of anything for production, but here’s a bit of what’s in the zeitgeist.
What’s On The Track Doesn’t Make Sense For The Street
The website, Motor 1, which first reported on the Instagram footage, commented that the mule was running with the RC-F GT3’s twin-turbocharged V-8. Two things here. We’d guess Lexus/Toyota Gazoo Racing would be working on a new powertrain, possibly related to the outgoing RC-F’s, but very likely, not.
Second, what’s likely at least as important is chassis development. Because if the point of TGR was to learn from racing, not only to develop better race cars but also better sports cars, we care more about how what they’re learning on the track will translate to future sports cars. The GR Corolla, after all, came out just after the same Tokyo Auto Salon that spawned the GR GT3. You can see Toyota using the GR Corolla as a racing tool, and you can also see Toyota’s improved chassis engineering hit cars across the spectrum. We’ve noticed that Toyota/Lexus vehicles on the whole are less vague and more precise than they were half a decade ago.
Lexus Has To Justify Racing
There’s a headwind against Lexus. Racing is always an exercise in branding, and TGR isn’t as easy to translate to either the Toyota or Lexus brands as racing is with, say, Ferrari, or even Mercedes in F1. You can see that the GR portfolio sells unevenly in the U.S., with the GR86 off to a hot start in 2025—while Toyota only managed to sell 421 GR Supras in the U.S. through March.
Toyota doesn’t separately break out GR Corolla sales, but Corolla overall sells in such high volume, you can envision why that car works as a sub-brand halo. It’s tougher to justify the Supra, however, with such low volumes. What Lexus needs is to compete with (and justify) a luxury sports sedan that can chop it up with the likes of Mercedes, BMW, and, increasingly, Genesis. And at the upper echelon, the likes of Porsche, too.
TopSpeed’s Take
It’s cool to see a mule run around a racetrack. And maybe all that car represents is Toyota/Lexus’s commitment to racing for its own sake. Other carmakers do a lot of that. We don’t confuse Ford’s Nascar racing machines for anything they put on the street, do we?
But if you take Toyota’s word that TGR exists as a test bed (and we do), then it’s wise to bet that they want the GR GT3 to pay dividends in some form for the street. And there’s a logic here, too, that it could, and that what replaces the Supra is a Toyota version that’s a souped-up Crown on some version of this chassis, and that what accrues to Lexus are multiple sedan/sports cars. Because the brand needs that sex, and they need it to refresh what’s now a very conservative, stable, but less exciting lineup.
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