Crossing the Finnish line: New Toyota GR Yaris driven on ice

Kievari Rantapirtti, located about 30 miles outside Jyväskylä in the heart of Finland’s ‘1000 Lakes’ region, is occasionally referred to as the ‘House of Kalle’.

Rovanperä, that is: the double World Rally Champion grew up just minutes away and honed his preternatural driving talents at the forest complex, on both its gravel tracks in summer and its frozen ice lake in winter.

Now it’s my turn on that frozen lake – and I’m behind the wheel of a Toyota GR Yaris to boot. Ice is the perfect canvas on which to showcase the hot hatch: power hard into a corner, dab the brakes, turn the wheel, then hit the accelerator, using the throttle pedal to control the slide.

So supremely balanced is the chassis of the GR Yaris that I can almost hear an enthusiastic Finn roaring his approval. “Turn, turn, brake, power, power, power. Yessss, more power!”

Except the enthusiastic Finn isn’t in my head: his name is Cedric and he is sitting in the passenger seat of the GR Yaris, offering tuition intended to turn me from Bumbling Brit into Flying Finn. Cedric is the son of Esko Reiners, who runs a rallying parts supply business and school that has a fleet of such Toyota hot hatches.

He also has some experience here: the first car he ever drove was a Group N Subaru Impreza. On this frozen lake. When he was 10.

That sort of passion for rallying and the need in winter to tackle tricky driving conditions on narrow, undulating roads perhaps explains why this region – home to Finland’s round of the WRC – has produced so many rally drivers. There’s Rovanperä, of course, and his dad Harri.

Then there’s Mikko Hirvonen, Henri Toivonen (plus his circuit-racing brother Harri) and four-time WRC champion Tommi Mäkinen, among others.

But Jyväskylä no longer just produces rally drivers: since 2017, it has been the home of Toyota’s all-conquering World Rally team – which also makes it the spiritual home of the GR Yaris.

The stories of the WRC programme and the hot hatch are intertwined – and have their roots right here. In fact, the GR Yaris is as authentically Finnish as the moose heads that dot the walls of Rantapirtti’s main cabin.

When Toyota president Akio Toyoda first met Mäkinen, the pair quickly bonded over a love of rallying. So when Toyoda wanted a test mule to evaluate a potential return of the Japanese firm to rallying’s top flight (and in turn a new road-going hot hatch), he called up the Finn.

After retiring from driving, Mäkinen had focused on farming but also ran his own rally team. He met Toyoda’s brief by taking the running gear of a Group N Impreza and stuffing it into the shell of a Toyota GT86 (which it was hoped could retain its Subaru boxer engine). It made a public outing in Jyväskylä on Rally Finland in 2014, with Mäkinen driving and Toyoda alongside.

That led to a green light for the Toyota WRC project, initially run by Mäkinen’s team from his farm near Jyväskylä, which began competing in 2017. Toyota bought the team outright from Mäkinen in 2020 to take more direct control of the operation, and it soon moved to a new site in the town.

The initial Yaris WRC was based on the standard car and, while incredibly capable, featured some inherent compromises. The GR Yaris road car was conceived to fix them.

This part of the story you probably know: the special architecture, bespoke three-door bodyshell, lowered rear roofline and extended front bumpers of the GR Yaris were all designed to optimise the planned 2021 GR Yaris WRC.

But this wasn’t a traditional homologation special: Toyoda insisted the GR Yaris should be a great road car. So the test mule was brought to the gravel stages close to Jyväskylä, and Toyota’s then WRC drivers were tasked with helping to develop it.