The technical director of Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT, Tom Fowler, says that his team will introduce some updates to the GR Yaris Rally1 for this season which are related to the aerodynamic package and the engine.
More specifically, looking some photos from Toyota's test for Rallye Monte Carlo, it is obvious that this year's Yaris has bigger rear fenders for improving the overall aerodynamics. Moreover, the Japanese team has adapted the engine to the hybrid unit considering the data that the mechanics collected during the 2022 and now the car will have a more consistent torque while there have been changes to the differential area.
"The main thing since Japan is an aerodynamic update which we’ve made to the rear fenders which is quite significant in looks", Fowler said.
"Those fighter jet inlets have now disappeared so we have a smooth-sided vehicle with much less pronounced hybrid inlets which is a cooling change basically for the hybrid system but also then of course a help in terms of improving the overall aerodynamics of the car.
"A lot of the work that was done on the cooling system was done theoretically last year so we didn’t have a hybrid system to measure anything, we just had some numbers as to how much heat is it going to make and how much do we need to cool it by to keep it under control.
"And so this was all based on estimations of data that was coming to us from the outside.
"It was a little bit off in terms of calculations from different aspects from the data we received to the work we did, it was all a bit theoretical and of course for the first season it was a case of going big and make sure we didn’t overheat it, and then now we’ve been able to optimize down from that.
"The rear wing ties in with the rear fender in terms of now the rear wing works better because we also changed the fender.
"And of course we had the fender and the rear wing already in mind together last year, but we didn’t bring the fender until this year.
"They’re kind of a package but you’ve already seen half of it.
"Everyone talks about peak power but in rally we’re also looking more throughout the whole range so if you talk about peak, no-one’s ever doing anything more than a couple horsepower in terms of peak but what we’ve also looked at is the operating range of the engine because now we have more data about how the drivers can use the hybrid and how they want to use the hybrid.
"It’s a bit clearer.
"I think this was a discussion before 2022 came ‘what will the engine packages look like because now hybrid is coming?’
"Do they need more torque, less torque and so on?
"So let’s say the characteristics of the engine has also been adapted a bit to match the hybrid that we have.
"In terms of an overall output of the whole system together, it means that we have more consistent torque".
Finally, he said about the driveshaft which has been upgraded for 2023: "It’s more like a bit of a reliability update, something that we’ve been managing in the background that’s been a bit tricky and we’ve now used the joker to update that so that should give us a bit more safety margin.
"Of course we’ve got some more jokers to use this year so we’re working on those at the moment.
"What we’ve done now is finishing all the things that were available for ’22".
Source: DirtFish.com
Photo Credits: Toyota
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