How the Toyota Prius became an unlikely racing hero.
Picture yourself in the stands at a race track with a half-century of history, Mt. Fuji hidden in the clouds on an otherwise-sunny day Below, the brightly colored racing machines curl into the hairpin before the long straight. As they scream past the line, you rise to your feet – an underdog team, spun out in the early stages, is clawing its way back from 18th in the field. Another lap, and the car is within striking distance of the lead.
Not just any Prius, the Prius GT was a mid-engined V-8 monster, fitted with impressive aerodynamic addenda on a highly modified racing chassis, but still incorporating a near-factory hybrid drive system. Built and campaigned for Toyota by apr Racing – not to be confused with Audi/VW tuners APR – multiple generations of the Prius spent the last ten years winning podiums and hearts in Japan. In 2022, their run came to an end.
Even if you've never attended a Super GT race, nor seen video clips of one, you've likely heard this soundtrack. Toyota's RV8 racing engine dates back to the mid-nineties, and was used in various displacements and applications from Le Mans to IndyCar. In the case of the Prius GT, the powertrain was meant to be the little brother of Toyota's then-new TS030 LMP1 hybrid, the prototype racer about to take the fight to Audi in the World Endurance Championship.
Had that been the extent of the engineering, the Prius GT might have been pretty cynical—a racing car that looked like a road car, but was only tangentially related. Instead, apr reworked the factory hybrid system to pair with the 3.4-liter V-8, placing the battery where the passenger seat would be for better weight distribution.
The following year, 2019, was when everyone expected the plug would be pulled. Switching to front-engine layout surely meant an end to the Prius era, and the return of the Supra. But apr debuted a new Prius GT powered by a front-mounted 5.4-liter V8, as found in the GT3 version of the Lexus RC-F. Physically, it resembled the plug-in version of the Prius roadcar, but it thundered like a muscle car.However, the magic was gone. The new front-engine Prius GT struggled to get into the top ten.
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