There are two announcements here, tightly braided: a corporate identity reset that reaches from Japan to Cologne, and a practical, on-track facelift for Toyota’s Hypercar. Taken together they’re less cosmetic housekeeping than a re-stacking of priorities — one foot on heritage, the other on the racetrack.
A return to the roots — "GAZOO Racing" comes back
Toyota Motor Corporation has announced that TOYOTA GAZOO Racing will revert to the name "GAZOO Racing" as the motorsports arm focused on making “ever-better cars” and developing talent. The message is very deliberately backward-looking: the program traces back to Akio Toyoda and a ragged, anonymous 2007 Nürburgring entry that ran as "Team GAZOO" and left its leadership with a bracing sense of humiliation about Toyota’s sports-car capability. That feeling, the company says, is the engine behind a long-running effort to reacquire car-making skills and pass them on.
You can read the company’s full statement via the official Toyota press release.
The structural change is two-fold. First: the European R&D and race-operations entity based in Cologne — until now Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe GmbH — will be renamed Toyota Racing GmbH and refocus on motorsports-specialised powertrains and technological development. Second: the public-facing banner under which many of Toyota’s grassroots and customer-racing initiatives will run will be GAZOO Racing again, explicitly tasked with motorsports-bred car development and talent cultivation.
That means, in practice, that top-class prototypes will carry the Toyota Racing name in WEC, while GAZOO Racing shifts to a broader remit that includes the World Rally Championship and customer racing. DirtFish reports the WRC arm will resume the Gazoo Racing identity in 2027, with 2026 serving as a transition year.
The TR010: evolution over revolution
On the technical side, Toyota revealed what it calls the updated TR010 Hypercar for the 2026 FIA WEC season — an evolution rather than a ground-up rewrite of the LMH GR010. The headline changes are an all-new aero package aimed at improving consistency and drivability, and a new red-and-white livery that deliberately gestures at the GT-One legacy.
Those changes follow a tough 2025 campaign for Toyota in the WEC: a season with far fewer highs than the team expected, capped only by a late win in Bahrain. Toyota’s technical staff have publicly framed the TR010 work as chasing usability and more consistent behaviour within the regulatory window (rather than chasing outright, fragile peak performance). That means reworking the front bodywork, sidepods and the rear wing geometry to better balance straight-line speed and stability through long stints.
Toyota’s technical director has been quoted saying the new aero will "make the car easier to drive" and reduce performance variance; other insiders describe the front slimmer bodywork and a gullwing-like rear profile as attempts to trim drag without sacrificing usable downforce. The car has already been through windtunnel cycles in Cologne and at Windshear in North Carolina, and has turned up for shakedowns at Paul Ricard and Lusail.
Why this matters — engineering, branding and the road
This isn’t just about a new paint job or a logo swap. Toyota is trying to keep two narratives aligned: one about a racing program that feeds the brand’s sporting credibility, and one about an R&D hub that develops technologies — particularly powertrains — that can be reused across motorsport programs and, eventually, road cars.
The rebrand uncouples those narratives in a tidy way. "Toyota Racing" (Cologne) becomes the engineering-lab, with an explicit remit to push hard technical developments into top-flight motorsport. GAZOO Racing, by contrast, gets to be the culture and talent arm — the track school that trains drivers, engineers and mechanics while keeping a direct line back to product teams that want motorsports-bred DNA in road cars.
There are immediate sporting questions. Toyota’s Hypercar now must be measurable against a Ferrari outfit that dominated 2025; the TR010 update seems aimed less at an absolute lap‑time handful and more at reducing the kinds of inconsistencies that cost podiums across an entire season. The Race’s coverage of the car notes this is the third major evolution of Toyota’s LMH platform — a long life by modern Hypercar standards — and one designed to squeeze more across-the‑board performance out of an existing package.
The human side: talent and memory
Toyota is explicitly leaning on its origin story — Akio Toyoda’s Morizo-era Nürburgring start, the LFA project and the shrine-like idea of craft transmission — to justify the move. That’s unusual in an era when corporate branding commonly collapses to a logo and a slogan. Here the company wants employees and fans to feel continuity: GAZOO Racing is, in Toyota’s telling, the cultural memory that will keep car-making skills alive through motorsport.
The change is staged: logo transition is slated to be complete in phases through January 2027, and certain teams — like the European R&D arm — will immediately adopt the Toyota Racing identity.
A small detour worth noting
For race fans thinking about Le Mans and the WEC calendar, there are a few connected items worth reading to understand how these changes fit into the bigger endurance racing picture: details about recent tweaks to the Le Mans qualifying format and a look at other manufacturers edging into Hypercar territory put Toyota’s moves into context. The company’s reorganisation and the TR010’s updates are clearly meant to keep Toyota competitive while its broader motorsport ecosystem reasserts a focus on engineering craft.
Toyota has two visible tasks now: make the TR010 more reliable and predictable on Sundays, and make sure the GAZOO/Toyota Racing split produces clearer technical progress for the road cars fans still buy in dealerships. It’s a strategy that mixes sentiment — the memory of Morizo and Naruse — with cold engineering pragmatism. Whether that will translate into more trophies in 2026 remains to be seen; the new identity and the evolved Hypercar arrive at the same time, and both will be watched very closely.