Toyota has confirmed that the Corolla will be making an official return to rally racing after a nearly 30-year sabbatical. The GR Corolla RC2 has been tapped to compete in the American Rally Association (ARA) championship for the 2026 season.
Its first foray into American rallying will take place in March at the 100 Acre Wood Rally in Missouri. American Seth Quintero will pilot the vehicle while the Finnish Topi Luthtinen will serve as his co-driver.
Chairman Akio Toyoda has been crystal clear that Toyota’s return to manufacturing sports cars and participating in motorsport was something he always desired. However, the dream wasn’t wholly selfish in nature. Toyota’s leadership also believes that these efforts will help the company curate a roster of talented engineers, resulting in better cars and a fanbase of enthusiasts it was previously ignoring.
Toyota doesn’t just want to build reliable vehicles, it wants to build icons people will remember decades later and the Corolla has a long history of being both.
The current GR Corolla was effectively designed to fill the North American gap in rally homologation cars. Except it wasn’t actually a rally car. The Yaris, which is no longer exported to our market, has been the automaker’s go-to WRC model since 2017 — becoming wildly successful in the process.
But Toyota did run the Corolla in the World Rally Championship until 1999 and the model was Toyota’s mainstay in loads of other rally events from 1975 onwards.
In WRC, the model effectively replaced the infamous Celica GT-Four shortly before the manufacturer opted to abandon WRC entirely in order to focus its efforts on Formula One and endurance racing in the early 2000s. This decision yielded mixed success. F1 turned out to be a bitter failure for the company, despite Toyota throwing a massive sum at the program. Endurance racing came later and worked out much better for the brand.
Returning to the World Rally Championship has likewise been a smart play for the company. Since returning to the WRC in 2017, Toyota has managed to win the Manufacturers’ Championships almost every single year. That success has made the homologation GR Yaris a hit with customers around the world. But the model was never shipped to North America.
With the Lancer Evolution discontinued years earlier and Subaru no longer offering the STI variant of the WRX, Toyota realized that there was a massive hole in the market. None of the current WRC models were even being sold here and the only car with a rallying pedigree was now trying to entice more mainstream customers while still appearing in ARA events.
You know the rest. The GR Corolla borrowed the GR Yaris’ internals and became one of the best sports cars available on our market. The hatchback received loads of praise for being a traditional sports car, right when automakers seemed to be moving away from them.
Now, Toyota has promised that the Corolla will make an earnest return to rallying. The GR Corolla RC2 will, predictably compete in the American Rally Association’s RC2 class. While perhaps not as spicy as its WRC counterpart, RC2 will feature hardcore rally vehicles. Entrants will feature all-wheel drive and 1.6-liter turbocharged engines (both of which the GR Corolla already come with).
Details on the Toyota are quite limited, however. We can clearly see the Corolla RC2 featuring some unique bodywork (mostly for cooling) and the requisite safety equipment (e.g. rollcage), along with rally wheels and tires. But the company hasn’t given a rundown on all the changes made to the standard GR Corolla that qualifies it to run in RC2.
With Subaru also still competing in the American Rally Association rally championship, many are hoping that Toyota’s participation will push a manufacturer rivalry. The battle between Subaru and Mitsubishi is arguably as legendary as the Lancia vs Audi. North Americans would undoubtedly like a taste of that — even if it happens on a much smaller, localized scale where the smaller company is still partially owned by the larger one.
[Images: Toyota]
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