Words: Peter Anderson
Images: Blake Currall
Co-pilots: Mark Dewar, Blake Currall
Two hot hatches. Three drivers. A whole lot of fun. The team takes on the two Toyota Gazoo Racing hot hatches, the GR Yaris and GR Corolla.
Toyota, typically, has been methodically beavering away at A Thing. For the first twenty years of this century – give or take – the Japanese giant stamped out the dullest, most dependable machines on planet Earth.
They were crushingly dull but sold by the millions and rightly so. Most folks couldn’t give a rat’s what makes their car go as long as it turns on every time you start it. The company basically invented hybrid and their whole go to market strategy for hatches and sedans marched towards electrification.
But the barbs were starting to stick to Toyota and the board were getting a bit antsy about the brand’s image. President Akio Toyoda (yes, related to the founder) had been in charge of the company since 2009 and weathered a recall of 8.5 million vehicles and being hauled in front of the United States Congress in 2010 to tell them how things would get better.
That all took a while. In 2016, without any of us really knowing, Toyoda-san signed off on a car that would change the way a lot of people would look at his company. The Yaris GR was born. Toyoda was already famous for being a massive hoon, partly because of his involvement in the delightfully bonkers V10-powered Lexus LFA. Toyoda even carries the status of Master Driver at Toyota having raced under the name Morizo Kinoshita. He was heavily involved in the development of the Yaris, too.
Then there was the (in)famous and now-legendary public pronouncement – no more boring cars. In the space of a few years, Toyota went from having nothing interesting for people who like driving to having a portfolio of performance cars and a flagship performance brand in Gazoo Racing.
In the rear-wheel drive sports car corner we’ve got the A90 Supra and second-generation GR86. In the all-wheel drive rally weapon corner we got the Yaris GR. And finally we got the Corolla GR, a classic hot hatch in the GTi mould.
We think buyers roll into a dealer looking at both of those cars. So we put them together to see what’s different and why you’d choose one over the other.
Please bear in mind that we tested the pre-facelift MY2024 versions of both cars. Yes, I’ve been busy.
Toyota GR Yaris
MY2024 Yaris GR: $51,390
MY 2024 Yaris GR Rallye: $56,390 + ORC
MY2025 Yaris GR GT: $55,490
MY2025 Yaris GR GTS: $60,490
The Yaris GR is like a modern-day Ford Escort Cosworth, a car I was obsessed with as a teenager. I nearly wrote kid, but I’m too old to get away with that. The Escort was a Frankenstein car, knocked together from (mostly) Sierra bits, right down to having a longitudinal rather than transverse engine.
While I wouldn’t say Toyota went that far with the Yaris, it is half-Yaris, half-Corolla with a purpose-built turbo three-cylinder and barely any shared body panels with its nameplate base car. It was made for the WRC but a little global health crisis pretty much killed that version of the rules, leaving the GR Yaris a bit of an orphan. A homologation special for homologation that never happened.
But, when it comes down to it, the bewinged Escort and chunked-up Yaris were both built for rally stages. So yeah, I reckon the description holds.
The Yaris comes in two flavours, the entry-level and the Rallye. I asked for the Rallye spec partly because last time I drove one, it had the Dunlop tyres from the basic car rather than the Michelin Pilot Sport 4s. On the base car, they allow for an extremely solid level of hooliganism that I appreciate, but I wanted to see what PS4s did for the sharper Rallye in the real world.
The Rallye’s upgrades from the standard car include the tyres, 18-inch BBS wheels (replacing the Enkeis), limited-slip diffs front and rear, red brake calibers, uprated springs and dampers heated seats and a few bits and bobs. It’s mostly about the mechanical package to deliver a sharper drive over the standard car.
Toyota GR Corolla
MY2024 GR Corolla GTS: $64,190 (manual)
MY2025 GR Corolla GTS: $67,990 (manual) $79,490 (automatic)
Pretty much as soon as the Yaris landed, the internet started screaming for a GR Corolla. It made a lot of sense. The Yaris is tiny, impractical for families and both the i30N and Golf GTI exist. The Corolla’s global appeal endures, even in our SUV-mad world and as a hatchback, doesn’t look half bad.
Toyota had less to do making the GR Corolla. For a start, it’s actually a Corolla rather than the mix-and-match build of the Yaris. Technically it should probably be cheaper than the Yaris because it would be less expensive to build, but that just wouldn’t be cricket, Yaris owners would howl about their resale getting smashed.
So it’s basically a tough-looking Corolla with new front and rear ends, skirts and wings along with a lot of plastic cladding to widen the body and fit everything in. Wheels you won’t see on any other Corolla and of course, the Honda-style triple exhaust.
The interior is largely the same as a ZR Corolla but has nicer, grippier seats, alloy pedals and a manual shifter, something you won’t find anywhere else in the Corolla range (I think). It has all the same pros and cons as any other Corolla hatch – including the tight rear seat – but overall it’s a more comfortable car than the Yaris.
I mention the ZR because the GR is based on just that spec, with LED headlights, auto high beam, LED fog lights front and rear, dual-zone climate control, keyless entry and start, a heated steering wheel and heated front seats.
The GR also gets 18-inch Enkei alloy, Yokohama Advans, triple exhaust outlets and Torsen LSDs at both ends like the Yaris Rallye/GTS.
What are they like to drive?
GR Yaris Rallye
Engine: 1.6-litre turbocharged three-cylinder
Power: 200kW
Torque: 370Nm
Transmission: six-speed manual, all-wheel drive.
Let’s start with the Yaris. Before this, I’d had a good amount of seat time in both versions as well as a week with the Rallye on the wrong tyres (on that point, I think Michelins weren’t always easy to come by after the Yaris’s initial launch and the thrashing these cars got meant they needed whatever rubber was available).
Stepping into the Yaris, you sit quite high, like the Recaro-equipped first and second-gen Ford Fiesta STs. It does limit taller folks a little from enjoying the delights of the smaller car, so bear that in mind if you’re a towering inferno of a person. It also means a slightly awkward position for the rest of us, with a funny wheel-pedal-shifter relationship that takes a little bit of getting used to. But it works. And whatever you do, make it work.
The day we had to thrash was damp and dismal but the rain had held off long enough for dry tarmac. Settling in took all of ten seconds and I was immediately able to absolutely throw the Yaris down the road without having to think too hard about it.
It’s one of those cars that activates your sixth sense for keying the performance to the conditions, something I noticed the first time I drove one around the Sutton Road facility in the ACT so beloved of Toyota. It takes no time at all to find a comfortable level and give it the whip.
It’s an incredibly quick car for its size, the turbo three-cylinder conjuring up an improbable amount of driveable power. It’s not what you’d call super-linear but it gets up and goes surprisingly quickly and you’ve got a ton of torque to play with so you don’t have to constantly change gear.
The Rallye/GTS’s pair of Torsen LSDs make it a much sharper machine, with a lot more mechanical grip over the Dunlop-shod/open-diff GT. That car definitely has its charms – it’s delightfully loose even on dry tarmac – the GTS counters with a very different, sharper drive. That in itself is a genuine, colossal achievement if you ask me. The same car with two distinct characters, yours to choose. I really like that.
More grip, better turn-in, better exit. The car rotates happily in just about any situation. There’s a twisty dial on the console that takes you from Normal to Sport to Track. I was perfectly happy in Sport all of the time. Track made the car feel tighter and given I like a bit of movement, I stayed away from Track, but quickly understood the point of it.
It’s a ripper of a car and if we had to wait this long for something this good, it was worth it.
GR Corolla GTS
Engine: 1.6-litre turbocharged three-cylinder
Power: 221kW
Torque: 370Nm
Transmission: six-speed manual, all-wheel drive.
Next, the Corolla. Immediately this car feels more normal. It probably helped I hadn’t long before had a Corolla ZR hybrid, a car that we’re not supposed to like but I do. Everything is easy to find and as a daily, it’s more refined overall and easier to live with. Bigger boot than the Yaris, better seating position, a few more little niceties.
On the face of it, the Corolla seems more like the Golf GTI of more recent years (I have not driven the most recent Golf 8 refresh, so restrict your thinking to 8.0 back to 6). A car aimed at folks my age and a bit younger, but who have given up a bit and are more on the luxury end of buying, treating themselves. Hmmm. Let’s see how this pans out.
Like the Yaris, the interior is a bit plasticky and Toyota just can’t help themselves with Fisher Price rocker switches I thought had long since been banished, but there are still a couple, as there are in the Yaris. The seats are great and Toyota is doing well with front seats in there upper-end cars these days, I feel like at some point someone bought a Peugeot and went, “Yeah, like that.”
You feel a bit of Yaris in the clutch action as you dip it for the start, and the suitably notchy shifter feels instantly familiar. As does the mild rasp of the turbo triple as you fire it up. Start it rolling and oh my goodness, how did I get to be going this fast already?
So much of the Yaris DNA is in this car, so much that I think it’s just plain GR DNA. The Supra feels great really quickly, too, so the range feels like that golden period of BMW M cars when Albert Biermann was put in charge, before he went to play with Hyundais on the Nurburgring. The consistency across the GRs feels like the M2, M4 CS and M5 under his leadership – same but different and clearly built by hoons for hoons.
Its extra weight is smothered by the extra power. The 5.3-second 0-100km/h is testament to that, the extra power coming from freer flowing exhaust with that extra central outlet, bigger fuel pump and oil cooler capacity and just plain old more boost (up to 25 psi).
The Corolla loves corners and given its longer wheelbase, inspires even more confidence. You feel like it’s more likely to catch you than throw you off the road. You can cover ground very quickly in this car, but it feels more together in the sense that there’s less movement – and, as you might expect, an ever-so-slightly softer turn-in. We’re talking two tenths of bugger-all here, but enough to notice.
The Yaris feels like it gets off corners better, but honestly, they’re difficult to split. And that is where we come to say the glorious words:
Choosing one over the other is not going to be a mistake.
Unless there is a super-niche reason you’d need one or the other, they’re both incredible fun. The Corolla is more liveable day-to-day, no question, but nobody who has a Yaris GR is buying another car because they can’t stand it in traffic. Degrees. Tiny ones.
I would – just – choose the Yaris. I don’t have to carry kids around, it’s usually just me and my beloved. The Yaris is tiny, which is my kind of car – I love these small hot hatches having owned a Clio 172, a Peugeot 205 GTI and 306 GTI-6. The Yaris is as special to drive as each of these in the right time and place but with all-wheel drive, less scary.
And my co-pilots Blake and Mark?
Mark, with whom I have spent a lot of time in all kinds of machinery and who is a very accomplished driver, was more in favour of the Corolla. “I liked the Corolla as the Yaris is mischievous. Fun and involving but more likely to bite if not well-guided. Corolla is a bit less on edge for me. Second run on 30/70 [front-rear drive bias] was the best.”
See? It’s a split decision.
Blake, snapper extraordinaire and former-now-sometime racing driver says the Yaris is hands-down more fun, more up on its toes, more of a scamp that feels a little unhinged thanks to the short wheelbase. He concedes the Corolla is arguably the better car, but a bit too sterile and grown up for his taste.
Blake drives incredible cars all the time and looked like he was having the time of his life in these things.
And so as the day drew to a close and weather brought with it mist and rain, I sent them both ahead of me on a stretch of road we all know well. Entirely coincidentally, I followed them in a GR-adjacent machine, Mark’s immaculate second-gen BRZ, the Subaru version of the GR86.
Yeah, the GR86 is more different these days, but close enough for my purposes. Same easy-to-use gearbox, very different character but a car you can grab a hold of and send, although in this weather with a lot more care and caution.
The Yaris and Corolla? Long, long gone. Nothing can stop you having fun in these things.
