How the Toyota Prius Became an Unlikely Racing Hero

Picture yourself in the stands at a race track with a half-century of history, Mt. Fuji hidden in the clouds on an otherwise-sunny day Below, the brightly colored racing machines curl into the hairpin before the long straight. As they scream past the line, you rise to your feet – an underdog team, spun out in the early stages, is clawing its way back from 18th in the field. Another lap, and the car is within striking distance of the lead. Onward they come and, against all probability, you're cheering for a Toyota Prius.

Ten years ago, at the 2013 running of the Fuji 500km, the most unlikely racing machine of them all made a most unlikely comeback. It was the first win for a hybrid vehicle in the history of Japan's top-tier Super GT series, and it made an instant hero out of a car that has been an enthusiast punchline since it arrived in the early 2000s.

Not just any Prius, the Prius GT was a mid-engined V-8 monster, fitted with impressive aerodynamic addenda on a highly modified racing chassis, but still incorporating a near-factory hybrid drive system. Built and campaigned for Toyota by apr Racing – not to be confused with Audi/VW tuners APR – multiple generations of the Prius spent the last ten years winning podiums and hearts in Japan. In 2022, their run came to an end.

Yes, there is a new civilian Prius, and it's more dynamically engaging than any of the preceding models. It's sleek , the base 194 hp model is now about as quick to 60 mph as a Civic Si, and the chassis is stiffer and lighter. Nevertheless, Toyota won't race the new Prius.

That it decided to do so in the first place was a daring move. That apr stuck with the Prius through multiple generations, layouts, and rule changes is somewhat incredible. As recently as 2019, the decision was made to run a new version of the Prius GT instead of a racing-derived variant of the more-obvious GR Supra.

By this point, the Prius GT is a fan favorite with Super GT crowds. In Japan, a Prius is a family car, and seeing one use its hybrid power to get past a GT300-spec Lamborghini Huracan in a tight turn is certainly worth cheering about, and any owner might be forgiven for wishing, on the drive home, that their personal Prius came with an eight-cylinder soundtrack like the GT.

Even if you've never attended a Super GT race, nor seen video clips of one, you've likely heard this soundtrack. Toyota's RV8 racing engine dates back to the mid-nineties, and was used in various displacements and applications from Le Mans to IndyCar. In the case of the Prius GT, the powertrain was meant to be the little brother of Toyota's then-new TS030 LMP1 hybrid, the prototype racer about to take the fight to Audi in the World Endurance Championship.

Super GT, formerly the All Japan Grand Touring Championship (JGTC), is not well-known outside of its native Japan, though there have been crossover attempts with Germany's DTM series. There are two levels in Super GT, the more strictly formulaic GT500, and the lower GT300, which has a little more flexibility.

GT300 used to be a real wild west of racing in the JGTC days, probably the only place you could see a Dodge Viper racing against a Toyota-badged Chevy Cavalier. Super GT rules streamlined things a little, but are still fairly open to interpretation. The three main categories are FIA GT3 specification cars; regulation carbon-fibre chassis “dressed up” to look like a production car; and modified Japanese Automobile Federation (JAF) regulated production vehicles, of which the Prius is one. This means that despite being partly built of tube-frame supports and carbon-fiber panels, and having a bespoke racing engine, the Prius GT is genuinely Prius-based. In the case of the first car, built around the second-generation Prius road car, little more than the bulkhead, some of the floorpan, and half of the roof remained.