Toyota’s Le Mans-winning GR010 Hypercar will be coming to Gran Turismo 7 in the next couple of months, with the car scheduled for use in a round of the 2022 Toyota Gazoo Racing GT Cup.
The GR010 is the latest in a line of successful, top-tier racing cars from Toyota which has seen the company undefeated in the 24 Hours of Le Mans since 2018, winning the World Endurance Championship in each season too.
It succeeds the TS050 as the brand’s front-running machine following a change of rules ahead of the 2021 season. Spiralling costs for the LMP1 category had seen Porsche, Audi, Nissan, and Peugeot all withdraw over the years, and the FIA and ACO came up with the Hypercars category to replace it.
Using a strict cost cap and controlled hybrid formula, the class had originally intended for manufacturers to build racing cars from high-performance road-going machinery. However any plans of homologated road cars — as with the famous GT1 era — have since been shelved, with the majority of entries being bespoke racing cars. One car has even been a rebadged LMP1-H.
That means we might never see the Toyota GR Super Sport road car that would have served as the homologation model for the GR010, but the GR010 itself has already proven peerless in the fledgling category.
Alongside capturing the Le Mans title at its first attempt in 2021 — with a 1-2 finish — the GR010 was undefeated across the entire WEC season. Each of its two entries won three of the six races, and the pairing scored a 1-2 on four occasions.
Gran Turismo 7 players will get to experience the car for themselves soon, with the GR010 scheduled to arrive in the game before summer. It’s scheduled for use in a round of the 2022 Toyota Gazoo Racing GT Cup at, appropriately, the Circuit de la Sarthe.
The GR010 probably won’t be the only new-to-game car used in the fourth season of the Gran Turismo championship either. A race at Autopolis on July 18 will use the GR86 — the last new vehicle added to GT Sport — or the Subaru BRZ, which likely means the GR-based 2021 BRZ will join its two 86GT-based siblings.
With the relevant race for the Hypercar coming on June 5, we’re expecting it to arrive some time in the next five weeks and in one of the first batches of planned content updates for GT7 which start later in April.
See more articles on Gazoo Racing and Toyota.
