Toyota Races a GR86 Without Its Boxer Engine

Toyota raced a GR86 concept at Okayama over the weekend of October 24 with a new naturally aspirated 2.0-liter inline-four in place of the production car’s Subaru boxer engine.

The car is the No. 32 GR86 Future FR Concept, which the Toyota Gazoo Rookie Racing team entered in round six of Japan’s Super Taikyu endurance series. It ran a turbocharged 1.6-liter three-cylinder at last year’s season finale, so the switch to a larger engine without a turbo is a sharp change of direction.

Japanese magazine Car Watch reported the engine change from the paddock, and both Motor1 and CarBuzz based their stories on that coverage rather than on spy photos or a Toyota announcement. In a follow-up, Car Watch said the engine appears to be the G20E turbo four with the turbo removed and the compression raised, though it noted the block may differ slightly. Toyota hasn’t confirmed what the engine is, and it hasn’t said whether the next production GR86 will use it.

None of the output figures are official either. A team mechanic told Car Watch the engine makes around 200 PS, while the later report put it at about 220 hp. That would sit close to the 228 hp of the current car’s 2.4-liter flat-four, and driver Kazuya Oshima told the magazine the engine revs more than the team expected. Car Watch also wrote that chairman Akio Toyoda calls the car Oshima’s personal research project.

Toyota has said the turbocharged G20E is targeting more than 400 hp, and at a May 2024 engine workshop with Subaru and Mazda it described its new small four-cylinder family as meant for everything from family cars to sports cars. Car Watch cautioned that a road car is still far off, since a front end built around an inline-four would be hard to share with the boxer-powered Subaru BRZ.

The Toyota Report Take

A high-revving, naturally aspirated Toyota four in the GR86 would suit the car better than a turbo, because the whole appeal of the 86 is a light, responsive engine that rewards wringing it out. The catch is the BRZ partnership, and a race car alone doesn’t tell us Toyota is ready to walk away from it.