Yahoo Autos Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda Doesn't Plan to Quit Racing Anytime Soon
You’re never too old for anything, the saying goes. For Toyota’s new chairman and former president Akio Toyoda, that means keeping his title as the company’s “Master Driver” and going back to race at the Nürburgring soon because he’s still nearly as fast as the company’s top test drivers.
At a roundtable with a small group of international media outlets, including Road & Track, at the 24 Hours of Le Mans earlier this month, Toyoda, 67, promised a return to the Green Hell; the place where he first honed his skills as a driver before becoming the company’s president and where its Gazoo Racing organization was effectively born.
“I’d love to,” Toyoda said through an interpreter. “My starting point as a driver was the Nürburgring. Actually, for my debut, I didn’t really have any driving skills yet. I was so afraid of driving there, and that’s the only memory I have.”
Toyoda added, “But now, after building up my driving experience in Japan and Asia, I think I’ve trained myself quite a lot. And I hope my skill has gone up since that time… I hope to have an opportunity to drive at the Nürburgring again and have a conversation with the roads there.”
“I think I’ll make a promise with you here,” he told reporters. “Next year. I don’t know if it’s going to be the 24-hour race like the VLN (Nürburgring Endurance Series), [but] I will be participating in some kind of race at the Nürburgring next year.”
While it’s not exactly uncommon for auto industry executives to take part in motorsports, it’s also far from universal. Ford CEO Jim Farley is a known racer as well, and in fact finished 12th in the GSX class driving a Mustang at Daytona this year. And General Motors President Mark Reuss is also a formidable racer with a lot of track time under his belt.
“Now I’m in a position where if I say this inside the company and try to receive approval, it’s going to be quite difficult. So I thought I’d use this opportunity in front of you, on record, so that can get me support in gaining that approval,” Toyoda said.
In Toyoda’s case—and in something that has become a part of modern Toyota lore at this point—racing is how he really got to know the products his family’s company makes. He rose through the ranks as an executive in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but unlike many at the company is not an engineer by background. (His replacement as president, Koji Sato, is, however.)
Toyoda has said that by training with the company’s late, legendary Master Driver Hiromu Naruse, he learned how to “talk” with the car, its tires and the road—and his engineers. He started racing with Naruse in the late 2000s, including in a secondhand Toyota Altezza for a largely bootstrapped entry into the 2007 24 Hours of Nürburgring. There, he raced the nom de guerre of “Morizo” because this wasn’t exactly a company-sanctioned event.
Naruse died in a crash at the Nürburgring in 2010, a year after Toyoda became president. He maintained his mentor’s legacy up by building up the Gazoo Racing team’s efforts, including in the World Endurance Championship and other series. Toyoda stayed in the driver’s seat as well, last racing at the 24-Hour Nürburgring race in 2019. At Le Mans this year, Toyoda did a parade lap before the race in the hydrogen-powered GR Corolla H2 Concept currently competing in Japan’s Super Taikyu endurance series.
And as Master Driver, he became a final arbiter of the company’s vehicles. He’s pushed a number of performance cars to production in recent years, including the GR Corolla and GR Supra, only signing off on them when he says they're ready.
Earlier in the roundtable, Toyoda said that despite his age, he can still more than handle himself in a race car. Toyoda frequently enters races at the pro and “gentleman” driver level along with test drivers at his company. But time comes for us all, and Toyoda, like the rest of us, isn’t getting any younger. So there’s a rule they decided on together a few years ago. “If my time is 10 seconds slower than these other drivers on the same course, then I will quit being the Master Driver,” Toyoda said. “This assessment is going to be based on this time gap, not my age.”
He said that when he started driving the GR Corolla H2 Concept, he had a five-second gap against his test drivers at first. Now, on average, he trails them by about one second, he said. In other words, he doesn’t think he’s going anywhere.
“So the time when I’ll quit as Master Driver has become more far into the future,” Toyoda said.
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