Hybrid climber
‘This car is totally new…it has less than 10 per cent in common with the 2018 car’
The seismometers that pepper the landscape around Oyama town in Japan are some of the most accurate in the world. A few months ago, though, they recorded an entirely new sound, a vibration that could be felt through the floor of structures nearby the epicentre. This time it was not a sign of the impending eruption of Mount Fuji, it was a somewhat more unlikely source – the engine sound of a Toyota Prius.
The world’s best selling hybrid road car has been a fixture of Japan’s Super GT championship since 2012 but, for the 2019 season, a new version of the car is competing in the series. Two classes of car contest the championship, GT500 for works teams running to the new Class 1 technical regulations, and GT300, which is aimed at small tuning companies and privateer teams. It is in this second tier that the Prius runs.
However, it is not quite that simple. The GT300 class allows for three different types of racecar: FIA GT3-specification (including, at times, pre-homologation versions), ‘Mother Chassis’, which use a common carbon fibre monocoque and a spec V8 engine, and JAF GT300, which is a specific set of regulations for highly modified production cars.
Based in Atsugi,
