Why is Toyota Australia getting into the Supercars series? It turns out, the reason isn't to win

Toyota’s jumping into Australia’s most iconic motorsport series — Supercars.

The GR Supra will be its vehicle of choice and this year it’s prepping for its debut.

Toyota announced its commitment late in 2024, but why is the brand doing it? It’s apparently been on the cards for more than two decades and it turns out the reason isn’t solely ‘to win’.

The failures and the potential to lose is something Toyota Australia Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Franchise Operations Sean Hanley is actually rather excited about.

The main reason for Toyota getting on board Supercars?

“Learnings,” Hanley said. “But it won't be our learnings when we win, necessarily. It'll be our learnings when we don't win. When we have a failure or downtime, or it'll be about how we acted as a team, how we responded, what was our teamwork like? What was our part supply like? It'll be the learnings. It'll be what's worked well.”

Late last year, President of Gazoo Racing Company Tomoya Takahashi visited Toyota Australia’s headquarters in Melbourne, and while part of the trip involved meeting with media (including CarsGuide) to discuss the future of GR and performance cars in Australia, there was another internal Toyota meeting.

That meeting involved the brand’s local arm making a pitch to Takahashi to join the Supercars series.

“When we sought the approval of GR Company - because we had to get this endorsed - we presented everything, business case, the cost, all the normal commercial things that you present. The reason we want to do it, all those things, brand, customer reach, all those things.

“We're enthusiastically presenting this to Takahashi, the President of GR Company, and he's sitting there attentively reading and listening.

GR Cup racing series

"And he put the meeting paper down. He went, ‘I get many of these proposals… but the one thing missing from this whole paper, and the only thing I want to understand is, what will we learn?’

“What value will we get out of this association in terms of our learning, both technically, teamwork, responsiveness… I want to understand from an engineering and technical perspective, what will we learn?

“That was the key to his approval.”

Toyota GR Supra Gen3 Supercar

It probably helps that Toyota is already heavily involved in Supercars race weekends through the GR Cup racing series which sees rising star drivers strapped into GR86 race cars and sent around the track ahead of the main Supercars event.

That, and Toyota has been one of the biggest names in Australian rallying for decades.

As well as coming away with the kind of technical learning that can only be had from rebuilding a Supra that’s commingled with Forest’s Elbow, Toyota Australia gains a little more attention from global HQ. Especially, Hanley says, once the higher-ups see what Supercars is all about.

“I have no doubt that once our senior executives see the race and understand the race, they will be very surprised how good it is,” Hanley says.

“They understand the race, but they don't necessarily see the race. So this will be almost a wonderful way to introduce our senior executives to Supercars.

“And I think when they see it, they're going to go, ‘wow’. And that's when you start to get this alignment between, ‘what can we take out of this? What are we going to learn out of this? Okay, we wouldn't mind sending our engineers over to your team for a while’.”