Toyota’s GR GT3 Races This Weekend, for No Points

Toyota’s new GR GT3 race car will start its first races on November 7 and 8 at Motegi, and it will not be allowed to score a single point. The twin-turbo V8 coupe replaces the Mercedes-AMG GT3 that Rookie Racing has run all season in the GT300 class of Japan’s Super GT series, and because the team is changing cars for the final weekend, it enters as a special vehicle outside the championship.

The car will carry the No. 32 and the name ENEOS X PRIME GR GT3 concept, and the two drivers stay the same. Hiroaki Ishiura, one of the lead development drivers for both the GR GT road car and its racing version, shares the cockpit with 19-year-old Tokiya Suzuki. The pair took four top-10 finishes in the Mercedes this year, with a best result of second at Fuji Speedway in August, and the team says the AMG leaves with 57 points from six rounds.

Rookie Racing, the team founded by Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda, announced the switch on October 26 and said the entry was made possible by a special approval from the GT Association, which runs the series, and the cooperation of the other parties involved. The team’s partnership with Mercedes-AMG began in 2023 in the ST-X class of the Super Taikyu endurance series, and it thanked the German brand for its support. RACER reported that the Motegi weekend is a double-header of 250-kilometer races, and that the first of them on November 7 doubles as the make-up for a GT300 round that was lost earlier in the year, so the finale settles the title over two days.

Not scoring is the point of the exercise. RACER says the team will treat the two races as a full-length data gathering session before the GR GT3 begins its first proper season in 2027. Rookie Racing is set to run the car full-time in Super GT next year and at the Nürburgring 24 Hours alongside KCMG, the other Toyota-backed Super Formula team. RACER also reports that Akkodis ASP is expected to field two GR GT3s in the FIA World Endurance Championship and that Vasser Sullivan Racing is expected to do the same in IMSA, with a North American debut still planned for the Rolex 24 at Daytona in January. Toyota has not confirmed the WEC and IMSA programs.

The racing debut comes less than a year after Toyota Gazoo Racing showed the GR GT and GR GT3 as prototypes on December 5, 2025, and about ten months after both cars made their first public appearance at the Tokyo Auto Salon in January, where they ran demonstration laps. The GT3 car shares its 3,998 cc twin-turbo V8, its aluminum space frame and its double-wishbone suspension with the road car, and Toyota’s published prototype targets put it at 4,785 mm long and 2,050 mm wide. The road-going GR GT is a front-engine, rear-drive hybrid with development targets of more than 650 PS and 850 Nm of torque, and Toyota says it is still working toward a launch around 2027. Neither car wears a Toyota or Lexus badge. Both are branded GR, and Toyota has called them successors to the 2000GT and the Lexus LFA.

The path is a familiar one. The car the GR GT3 replaces, the Lexus RC F GT3, raced in Super GT for the first time in 2015, two years before customer teams got their hands on it around the world, and it just finished its last IMSA season with three more wins. RACER says the GR GT3 will follow the same cautious schedule, with no additional customer cars released until 2028. FIA GT3 rules require at least 20 cars to be built within two years of homologation, and the GR GT3’s homologation is still pending.

The Toyota Report Take

A race that cannot pay points is still a race, and that is why this matters more than the Tokyo Auto Salon demo or the Nürburgring test days. Two 250-kilometer sprints against a full GT300 field, with pit stops and traffic and a championship being decided around it, will tell Toyota things a private test never can. The company has watched the RC F GT3 win on three continents with a decade-old design, so it knows how much a patient first year is worth.

For American fans the date to circle is late January. If Vasser Sullivan really does bring two of these to Daytona, the GR GT3 will be racing in the United States before the road car it is based on has a price, which is about as Toyota a way to launch a supercar as there is.