Toyota’s Rally Team Is Building a Home Five Times Bigger

On November 2, Toyota’s World Rally Championship team broke ground on a technical center in Finland that will be five times the size of its current base.

The new home sits at Majajärvi, near Jyväskylä, and is due to be finished in August 2028, although work on the site started this August and the test track next to it is already complete. The team plans to use that track as its permanent shakedown venue starting next year, long before the rest of the complex opens.

The size comparison and timeline come from DirtFish, which attended the ceremony and described the site as a purpose-built home after the team spent years adapting existing buildings, first at Puuppola and then at its current base in Jyskä. Toyota Gazoo Racing CEO Jarmo Lehtinen, the former co-driver of Mikko Hirvonen, told the site the team had outgrown its current facility and wanted "everything under one roof." He also pointed to the location, which is 15 minutes from the airport and close to the main north-south highway, and said, "If this [place] is not working, we should look into a mirror and disappear."

At the ceremony, Lehtinen described the project as "a technical center for the future of motorsport," a place "where ideas become parts, parts become cars and cars become champions." He tied it to the region’s rally history, saying that "for years, Jyväskylä has given our team a home. Today, we are making that home permanent."

The groundbreaking came the day before the team announced it will split into two squads for 2027. In its release on the new line-up, Toyota said Toyota Racing will run the new GR Celica Rally1 and Gazoo Racing Toyota will run the GR Yaris Rally1, and that both will continue to operate under the same roof at the team’s headquarters in Jyväskylä. The release also confirmed that the new technical center at nearby Majajärvi is under construction.

The project has been years in the making. Toyota, the City of Jyväskylä and the Toyota Mobility Foundation signed a letter of intent for the center in 2023, and Autosport reported at the time that the plans included wooden buildings that store carbon, on-site power generation and hydrogen-powered mobility, with Toyota calling it a base for developing "ever better cars" in Europe. Jyväskylä’s city council approved the plans for the center, a two-kilometer test track and a separate service building in 2024, according to Rally Journal.

The Toyota Report Take

Teams that plan to leave a sport do not pour foundations five times larger than the ones they have. Toyota is about to double its WRC effort with a second team and a car carrying the Celica name, and this building is the clearest sign yet that the program is meant to outlast any single regulation cycle. For American fans, the payoff is indirect but real, because the engineers who will work here are the same people whose rally lessons have shaped the GR Yaris and GR Corolla, and whatever comes from this building will shape the road-going Celica that so many are hoping to see.