After being beaten for pace in Portugal, the Toyota team got to work to improve its GR Yaris Rally1 for Sardinia
Photography by Toyota
Words by David Evans, DirtFish Head of Media
Everything was stacked against Toyota ahead of round six last week. It had no test, no workable shakedown and the previous event in Portugal had been something of a disaster in terms of performance.
Something of a disaster. Yes, the GR Yaris Rally1 chalked up win five from five in 2025, but Ott Tänak’s hard-charging Hyundai had provided its biggest scare of the season. Ahead of the penultimate Saturday stage, heads were being scratched. Sébastien Ogier was doing all he could, but the Estonian looked to have an answer for all his French rival’s questions.
Through rally week, a frown’s never far from the face of Toyota technical director Tom Fowler, but sipping a cup of coffee just after lunch, the brow was particularly furrowed.
“It feels like Tänak can take time out of us at will,” he said. “We’ve started pretty much every stage thinking: ‘How much are we going to lose now?’ We know he’s going to be fast and we’re in this situation where we have to expect that he might not make it through a stage without a problem. That’s a really uncomfortable situation…”
So uncomfortable, Fowler departed for the data-rich environment of the TGR command center. Moments later, Tänak’s power steering failed. The collected sigh of relief was audible. Almost.
At the time, nobody knew quite how much of a drama this had become. The post-finish celebrations were shorter than usual. There was work to do.
A few weeks and another win down the line, Fowler picks up that story from Sunday night.
“We knew we didn’t have a test before Sardinia,” Fowler told DirtFish. “And we knew Sardinia was similar to Portugal. Maybe, among some of us, there was a quick consideration of trying to scramble a test – but that really quickly turned to: ‘How can we make this better?’
“You could have been forgiven for expecting a similar performance to Portugal from us, but I have to say, I’m as impressed as I’ve ever been with the work the engineering team and the drivers did between these two rallies.
“With no test, we had to use the tools available to us to get the car’s set-up right. Those tools were simulations, data, tools in the workshop, damper dynos, these kind of things. The guys put together a program that basically asked what can we do to learn more about this car, this tire and this driver; what’s the maximum you can do without turning a wheel in the car? And they did it. They came up with four key items that had to be improved. And we delivered the parts to create those four set-ups.
“They’re the items within the set-up window: springs, dampers, weight distributions, these kind of things, which are generally tuned. What are the key items they needed to give performance, or more drivability. What did they need? I think Séb [Ogier] mentioned it in one of his early interviews on this rally, where he thanked the engineers for giving him a car with a much better balance.
“[In Portugal] We were missing the balance which enables the driver to rely on the car doing what they want it to do, when they want it to do it – that’s actually difficult to understand how to improve that, even with a test. It’s sometimes easy, when you’re running a particular test road to make the balance better for that road.
Fowler is incredibly proud of the work the Toyota engineers - even though he was on holiday!
“The engineers and drivers were really digging into the debrief we had after Portugal, not only the one-to-one debriefs, but then going away, looking at what they’ve said, then trying to understand more – there were so many phone calls, messages, questions. The team then went away and did more research in those areas, coming up with these items and saying, ‘This is where we think we can make it better’.
“The drivers were really supportive and brilliant about it – we were a bit concerned they would come out of Portugal and say: ‘Why don’t we have a f****** test when everybody else does?’
“Test days are limited and we have a plan which is on a different schedule to everyone else. Had Portugal gone well, this would have been fine.
“Like I said, I’m so proud of the team, the way they turned this around is amazing and I’ll be honest here, I did, like, almost nothing because I was on holiday in Greece for the week before we left for Sardinia. When we landed back from Portugal, we were all in on the Monday morning, we did a solid week, then I left for holiday – maybe it helped having me out of the way!”
Words:David Evans
Tags: Rally Italy Sardinia, Rally Italy Sardinia 2025, Tom Fowler, Toyota, WRC, WRC 2025
Publish Date June 12, 2025 DirtFish 
https://dirtfish-editorial.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/2025/06/Rovanpera06ITA25cm356-780x1170.jpg June 12, 2025
Up Next
Facebook Conversations