It's been a hot minute, huh?
The February update finally added the Yaris GR to the game. And you probably know what I did as soon as I ticked it off in the Challenge Hub and had it added to my garage, since I'm posting here... But I couldn't just throw the love child of Toyota and the anabolic steroid industry around the Green Hell, without pitting it against a rival, could I?
And truly, there was only one obvious choice.
There's many similarities between the Yaris and the queen of super-hot hatches, the Honda Civic Type R. For starters, both are Japanese, very turbocharged, and available in rather handsome shades of white that harken back to the racing heritage of their respective manufacturers. But more importantly, the two cars share a similar ethos - unlike many other contenders in their category, which put appearances and big numbers in front, the Yaris and the Civic are true performance machines, built to tackle corners and provide (not-so) cheap driving thrills.
But while they come from similar places, they differ quite significantly on more substantial aspects: on one hand, the Yaris is a stubby 3-door homologation special built with rally racing in mind, something reflected in the choice of AWD motivation; on the other hand, the Civic Type R goes for a more conventional 5-door bodyshell shared with its more pedestrian counterparts, and it has a FWD layout, just like its JAS-tuned TCR sister.
So, how do they perform on the ultimate proving grounds? Let's find out - newbie first.
Toyota's ankle-biter drives exactly how you'd expect, knowing of its rallying roots and inferring driving characteristics from its almost cartoon-esque styling: the rear end gets delightfully light under braking, and the AWD is perfectly balanced, allowing the kind of hair-raising, fast-in-fast-out lines only few road cars can really tackle in this game. This is all too well, because the awkward gearing of the car (and especially its 3rd gear) is enough to put a damper on the lively engine: the keyword to drive the Yaris fast is
momentum - you want to build it up quickly, and use the easily controlled lift-off oversteer to
keep it high through corners.
Christian Gebhardt drove the GR around the Nordschleife for
Sport Auto in 8 minutes, 15 seconds, and we've got him beat with a
8:09.772 - the optimal track conditions and zero fuel load undoubtedly helped.
If the Yaris, then, behaves like a steroid-addicted hooligan, the Civic is the polar opposite: precise like a scalpel, and composed like a Japanese businessman on a conference call. Unlike the original inception of the Civic Type R, which was infamously peaky, the FK8 delivers its power promptly, and smoothly - undoubtedly, the adoption of forced induction and twenty years of evolution of the VTEC system have served their purpose. The car is perfectly planted through corners, thanks to a stiff suspension setup, the aggressive aero and limited-slip diff working overtime, and the brakes are responsive and powerful. Perhaps, at times, this Civic is
too serious for its own good - and at others, it reminded me of its
wrong front wheel drive nature with a touch of corner-exit understeer which forced me to ease off the throttle. Still, from behind the wheel of this peppered-up Civic, it's easy to see why Honda has a reputation as the best manufacturer in the FWD performance car business.
The Yaris may be more fun and free-spirited, but at the end of the day, we're talking Nurburgring laptimes, here - and with a
7:54.711, the Civic leaves its spunky rival in the dust. The laptime neatly slots in between the "official" 7:44, and the 8:01 recorted by
Sport Auto.
Up next: remember when I said that
A better contest would see the Black Series pitted against the newer GT3 RS
? Well, yeah,
it's time.
). I am running 2 laps in each car to get a better feel for what a "normalised" time would be (for me at least).
)
