Supercars success won’t necessarily translate to sales, according to Toyota, but competing with the GR Supra will yield other opportunities.
Toyota Australia’s bid for the Supercars championship from next year will be conducted in a GR Supra, but with the model now discontinued, the question is why bother when punters cannot buy the car?
There was nearly a 12-month gap between Toyota Australia announcing it had signed to compete in V8 Supercars in September 2024, and the Supra being officially axed from the local line-up in August this year.
But, according to Toyota Australia Sales and Marketing boss Sean Hanley, the brand knew about the demise of the fifth-generation Supra sportscar in advance, and still chose to race the model anyway.
“People are kind of thinking, ‘why would they be doing that today? Do they know Supra was discontinuing?’ Yes, we did, of course we did,” Hanley said.
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“But we went on with it because we believe that Supra represents a strong brand name in Australia, but as Gazoo Racing (GR) matures, it’ll become stronger than even the Supra brand.
“That’s the theory behind that.”
While the Supra might not be available to local buyers anymore, Toyota still fields the GR Yaris and GR Corolla hot hatches, as well as the line of lightly-tweaked GR Sport variants for the Yaris Cross, C-HR, Corolla Cross, LandCruiser, HiLux, and next year’s RAV4.
According to Hanley, racing in Supercars will put the GR brand front and centre in people’s minds, but conceded it might not directly translate to a lift in sales for the go-fast sub-brand.
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“I’ve never believed ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’, I’ve never subscribed to that,” Hanley told Drive.
“I mean if you subscribe to that, why has Toyota been number one for the last 20 years?
“We’re going into it because we believe it’s right for us and the GR brand, and we believe it has a multitude of benefits for us.”
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Part of those benefits will be learnings in motorsport activities, as well as brand engagement opportunities, that Toyota will then be able to apply across other aspects of the business, said Hanley.
“Supercars for us is about what we learn, so we’re going to take a heap of learnings out of our successes, our failures, our reliabilities, our teamwork, our ability to work with different organisations outside Toyota that we’ve never really worked in this way with – all of these things are learnings that we in Toyota are like a sponge,” Hanley said.
“We’re going to learn …. And apply those learnings about engines, reliability, technology, teamwork, people’s responses and reactions to the GR brand – that’s the critical element of Supercars for us.”
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