Sleeping beauty: waking the only road-legal Toyota GT-One

In the tiled workshops at TGR-E, you’ll also now find development cars for the GR Supra and GR Yaris projects, because a portion of the 300 staff on site are now there to support the development of Toyota’s fruitier road cars. It’s in one of these workshops that K-LM 1998 resides, near one of the GT4 Supras, its bodywork removed and spotless innards on display.

Originally reverse-engineered from the competition car that would have won Le Mans in 1999 were it not for a tyre blowout before the final pit stop, this is surely one of the very loosest interpretations of a road-legal car. You could very easily forget that, for homologation purposes, it had to pass the same TUV assessment (Germany’s MOT equivalent) as any normal road car at the time.

It is extraordinary to behold, and fun to discover the bits that aren’t from the racing car. Items such as the leatherclad seats, which are from the Lotus Elise, and the ventilation controls, from Ford’s Ka. It’s hidden from sight, but ACO regulations of the day also stipulated that the road cars should have space for one small item of luggage, and so half of the race car’s fuel tank cavity was repurposed.

Those are the more whimsical elements, but the very serious business of fulfilling homologation law – that the car should be genuinely usable and safe on the road – goes much deeper. The racer’s sequential dog-ring gearbox remains, yet a custom set of helical gears was machined to replace the straight-cut gears that, along with extra sound deadening, allow the car to pass noise tests. The suspension wishbones are carried over but the geometry is altered and the pushrods are longer to allow for greater ride height. Because orifices wider in diameter than 100mm – bluntly, that of a baby’s head – were outlawed on the road, the bodywork was also fitted with various meshes and, for the huge intakes at the base of the windscreen, metal struts.

As for the powertrain, the road car has less aggressive camshafts, new inlet manifolds and revised fuelling, in part to help make up for the fact that the V8 did without the anti-lag system that kept the racer’s peaky turbochargers on the boil. Catalytic converters – two per bank – and two huge silencers then brought total power down to 550bhp from the racing car’s 620bhp, although at roughly 1100kg all in, on paper a fully working road-going GT-One would still be brutally quick.

In the coming weeks, the suspension will be assessed and the engine turned over by hand. But even if it hasn’t seized, K-LM isn’t out of the woods. For one thing, nobody has any idea whether the original race ECU still has its memory of the engine map for the 3.6-litre V8 (which, when in race trim, requires a rebuild every 3000 miles). And if it doesn’t, they are going to have serious problems, because the laptop used to access the ECU was discarded long ago, being ‘obsolete’.

Even assuming the ECU has held its memory, operating the car is, if not F1-grade involving, not far off. For example, it needs an entire oil change before the engine is started. Not just the first time, but every time. Unlike the race engine, the road-legal unit doesn’t benefit from being preheated with water warmed to 80deg C, so things can get… gritty. And because the oil tank hovers above one of the floor-mounted turbos, if you leave the car to sit for some time, fully oiled up, that oil trickles into the turbo and then seeps into the exhaust, so things can get very smoky, too. Despite the car’s valuation of €10 million, keyless-go really isn’t an option.

So why revive the GT-One now? Two reasons. Covid-19 and Le Mans 2021. The former has left one or two of the irrepressible GT-One tinkerers – including John Day, ex-chief WRC mechanic and the man who drove this very car to scrutineering at Le Mans in 1998 – with some time on their hands. The revival project is, for all intents and purposes, without funding, and even going to Bosch to get the ECU sorted, should it have forgotten anything, would be “out of the question”. Time and money are scarce, but in 2020 some of the former is going spare.

The second reason is that, next year, the top class at Le Mans will change to LMH hypercar regulations and Toyota has already demonstrated camouflaged versions of the road-legal GR Super Sport car that will be the homologation base for the racing car. And at times like these, it’s nice to be able to say ‘here’s one we made earlier’, which is something few if any of Toyota’s competitors – among them Alpine, Peugeot, Glickenhaus and perhaps even Bugatti and McLaren – will be able to do. An operational GT-One road car gives Toyota enviable cachet. Fingers crossed we’ll soon get to see it in action.

Toyota: win some, lose some

LE MANS HEAVEN: Porsche and Audi departed LMP1 for the 2018 season, but Le Mans is as much a battle against the environment as the competition. Toyota had an almost perfect 2018 race and finally won at La Sarthe, and did so again in 2019 and 2020.