Toyota just dropped a coupe-bodied, mid-engine racing prototype into Japan’s Super Taikyu series, and it looks an awful lot like the spiritual successor to the MR2 Turbo that enthusiasts have been begging for since the late 1990s.
The car is called the Yaris M concept, and it has evolved considerably from the rough prototype Toyota paraded at last year’s Tokyo Auto Salon. That earlier version was a GR Yaris hatchback shell with a turbocharged four-cylinder stuffed behind the cabin where the rear seats used to live. The new iteration wears full coupe bodywork with swollen rear fenders and a silhouette that closely mirrors Toyota’s 2027 World Rally Championship concept.
The engine is a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder Toyota calls the G20. Output sits in the range of 400 to 450 horsepower, which translates to roughly 200 horsepower per liter of displacement. This is not the buzzy 1.6-liter three-cylinder from the production GR Yaris — it is a different animal entirely, purpose-built for sustained high output.
Among the four drivers slated to campaign the car in Super Taikyu is Akio Toyoda himself, racing under his familiar Morizo alias. The Toyota chairman has long used grassroots motorsport as a proving ground for production-bound hardware. His personal involvement in a program usually signals that it is more than a one-off engineering exercise.
The second-generation MR2 Turbo, sold from 1989 to 1999, earned a devoted following as a mid-engine sports car that punched well above its price point. Toyota killed the nameplate after the third-generation car went soft, and rumors of its return have circulated for years without anything concrete materializing.
This prototype is the most concrete thing yet. The coupe proportions, the mid-engine layout, the turbocharged four-cylinder making serious power — it checks every box that an MR2 successor would need to check. The bodywork so closely tracks Toyota’s WRC concept that it suggests a shared platform strategy, the kind of engineering efficiency that makes a business case for a niche sports car viable.
The G20 engine could have a life beyond any single model. A 2.0-liter turbo four producing this kind of output is the sort of powerplant that slots neatly into multiple vehicles. Toyota has been rumored to be developing a new Celica to replace or complement the GR Corolla, and a proven race engine with this displacement and architecture would fit that brief perfectly.
Toyota has been on a tear with its Gazoo Racing lineup, delivering the GR86, GR Supra, GR Yaris, and GR Corolla in rapid succession. Each of those cars leaned on partnerships or existing platforms to make the numbers work. A mid-engine coupe would be a bolder bet, one that requires either a bespoke chassis or a very clever adaptation of rally hardware.
The Super Taikyu series has long served as Toyota’s open-air development lab, a place where prototypes get thousands of hard kilometers under race conditions before anyone commits to production tooling. Toyoda’s presence behind the wheel suggests he is not just watching this one from the boardroom.
Whether the Yaris M concept becomes a production MR2, a GR Celica, or something else entirely remains unconfirmed. But Toyota keeps spending money, track time, and its chairman’s weekends on a mid-engine turbo coupe that nobody asked them to build for a regional endurance series. That is usually how these things start.
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