The Celica Is Back, and Toyota Needed a Second Rally Team for It

Toyota said on November 3 that it will race a GR Celica Rally1 in the 2027 World Rally Championship, and that it is splitting its factory effort into two separate teams with two different cars to do it.

The new Toyota Racing team will run the GR Celica Rally1, while a second squad called Gazoo Racing Toyota will campaign the 2027 GR Yaris Rally1. Each team runs three cars, which means Toyota can enter up to six factory cars at every rally, and both will work out of the same headquarters in Jyväskylä, Finland, where the line-up was announced on November 3.

Toyota Gazoo Racing World Rally Team announced the plan on November 3, and it described the two squads as having their own identities while competing as "equal challengers for victory." Both cars are built to the FIA’s new WRC Car regulations, which are meant to make the top Rally1 class more accessible, and Toyota said both will have equal power and performance. Homologation is due in December, and Toyota said more details on the cars and their liveries will come before the season starts.

Who drives what

Team	Car	Driver / co-driver
Toyota Racing	GR Celica Rally1	Elfyn Evans / Scott Martin
Toyota Racing	GR Celica Rally1	Oliver Solberg / Elliott Edmondson
Toyota Racing	GR Celica Rally1	Sami Pajari / Marko Salminen
Gazoo Racing Toyota	GR Yaris Rally1	Ott Tänak / Martin Järveoja
Gazoo Racing Toyota	GR Yaris Rally1	Takamoto Katsuta / Aaron Johnston
Gazoo Racing Toyota	GR Yaris Rally1	Kalle Rovanperä / Jonne Halttunen (partial season)

The Celica gets this year’s top three drivers. Evans won the 2026 drivers’ title by five points over Solberg, Martin took the co-drivers’ crown, and the team won a sixth consecutive manufacturers’ championship, which equals the record. Solberg finished second with three wins, and Pajari finished third, also with three wins.

The Yaris team brings two familiar names home. Tänak returns to the Toyota fold, and Rovanperä comes back for part of the season. Katsuta stays after a breakout 2026 in which he won his first WRC events in Kenya and Croatia and became the first Japanese driver to lead the championship standings. Toyota also said Sébastien Ogier may make selected appearances and that it will consider young drivers from its GR WRC Challenge Program for extra entries.

Evans, who starts his eighth season with Toyota, said the new car will be "very different from what we’ve been used to, so there’s some work ahead for everyone to adapt." Tänak said he is "really happy to be back with Gazoo Racing Toyota" and that "with such big technical changes, there has been a lot for us to discover and learn." Rovanperä put his return more simply, saying "this team has always felt like family to me, and in a way I never really felt that I had left."

Further down the ladder, Yuki Yamamoto returns to WRC2 in a GR Yaris Rally2 for a championship campaign across selected rallies, and 17-year-old Hiroya Minowa moves up from Rally4 to Rally3 machinery.

The Toyota Report Take

Toyota did not need a second team to keep winning, because it has won six manufacturers’ titles in a row with one. It needed a second team so it could bring back the Celica name without retiring the GR Yaris, and putting both cars under one roof with equal power lets it build two brands at once while it keeps the results in house.

For American fans, the more interesting part is the badge. Toyota has said nothing yet about a road car to go with the rally car. Racing a car called the GR Celica on the world stage every other weekend is still a strange thing to do if no showroom version is coming, and I expect that question to follow Toyota all through 2027.