Know Your Gazoo
January 8, 2026
Alex KiersteinGazoo Racing has emerged as Toyota’s performance brand, supplanting TRD and other historic performance and racing groups. What is it, and where did it come from?
Gazoo Racing is all over the place now. Haas Racing partners with Toyota for its F1 program now, so its cars will wear the name “Toyota GAZOO Racing” for 2026. The high-performance vehicles in Toyota’s lineup have a “GR” prefix before their model names: GR Corolla, GR Supra, and soon GR GT. (In fact, the GR GT might not even be sold, technically, as a Toyota.) It’s all a bit dizzying. What happened to TRD? Toyota Motorsport GmBH? Where did Gazoo Racing even come from?
Gazoo Racing is also a compelling origin story, which is retold many, many times on Toyota’s various websites. A scrappy underdog team, a highly experienced master racer showing an improbable amateur the ropes. The heroic arc. Spin it, doubt it, or buy it entirely, it’s a good story.
One way to think of it: Gazoo Racing is pretty much an inside joke in service of Akio Toyoda’s racing hobby. Imagine Toyoda winking at you from inside a racing helmet. “It’s me, uh, Morizo Kinoshita,” he says unconvincingly. You know it’s Akio. “I’m not driving a works Toyota car,” he deadpans. “This is a GAZOO Racing entry.”
Toyoda wanted to race cars but couldn’t do so directly, as the grandson of the company’s founder and an executive vice president. He was deeply influenced by the company’s master test driver and Nürburgring expert Hiromu Naruse, who’d risen through the ranks from an inauspicious beginning through the Toyota 7 race car development team and finally to lead the company’s Nürburgring vehicle development program. Naruse apparently told Toyoda, “Somebody in your position, who doesn’t know the first thing about driving, shouldn’t make passing comments about cars. The least you can do is learn how to drive.” And Naruse offered to teach him.
Both are probably true. Toyoda’s interest in motorsport is well-documented prior to Gazoo. I have no doubt that Naruse’s offer combined with an existing interest. A scrappy little unofficial race team emerged. They raced Altezzas, then worked with the LF-A. Naruse died in a traffic accident in 2010 in an LF-A, but Gazoo continued.
Gazoo Racing, and the Morizo pseudonym, allowed Toyoda to both continue to do a dangerous activity as an important heir to the Toyota company and executive, but also allowed him to maintain that persona and a car development feedback persona. Naruse was probably right; feedback given as Morizo was probably weighed differently in the company than if it was given purely by an executive.
But why “Morizo?” Apparently the name was snagged from the Aichi Expo 2005, which Akio’s dad Shoichiro Toyoda was involved with. Morizo was a “Forest Grandfather [that] has been living in the forest since long ago. He’s an easy-going and kind old man, he has seen many things and knows everything, but he hasn’t lost his curiosity.”
And why “gazoo?” Another word with a few layers. “Gazo” means “image” in Japanese. Toyota had set up an image-based website (remember, the internet was young in the early 2000s) as a way to sell used cars. The word, within Toyota, became more like a shorthand for “garage”—a mental image of fantasy cars, as if they’d been listed on the newfangled image-based gazoo.com site. Another inside-joke-y aspect to the whole thing. But also, like Morizo, not without some deeper and interesting meaning once you put all the pieces together.
It makes sense that at least to Akio Toyoda, Gazoo Racing represents both an important vehicle development philosophy of sorts (executives should understand the cars their company develops intimately) and references his mentor-student relationship with Naruse, how Gazoo Racing allowed him to race cars, the thrill of being involved with a scrappy young race team. Given Toyoda’s weight within the massive corporation, it’s no surprise that what is essentially his personal racing and development operation became influential.
And now it may become its own brand, as mentioned earlier with the GR GT. But it’s also a little complicated. Toyota’s European racing arm, historically known as Toyota Racing GmbH and responsible for the development of the company’s highest-tier racing programs, is reverting back to that name. It was known as TOYOTA GAZOO Racing Europe GmbH for a while.
Meanwhile, the official “TOYOTA GAZOO Racing” styling drops the “TOYOTA.” Now it’s simply “GAZOO Racing.”
“TGR—under the name “GAZOO Racing”—intends to continue making ever-better motorsports-bred cars and fostering the talents of drivers, engineers, and mechanics,” Toyota’s release says.
A Toyota rep told me that Toyota Racing will be the nomenclature for certain global series, which Toyoda will announce in a few days—FIA WEC is a good bet. Gazoo Racing will be the retail performance sub-brand andwill also be used for other global racing entries. Despite backing off of the Gazoo Racing branding in some motorsport situations, GR is still ascendant within the company’s production vehicles to the point of being the primary branding on the GR GT and, probably, future performance-oriented Toyota vehicles.
Oh, and TRD? It’s not for cars anymore. Toyota Racing Division, which once had the role of being both a racing brand, dealer aftermarket parts arm, and prefix for the sportiest versions of Toyotas has been replaced by GR branding. Except on body-on-frame trucks, so TRD will be used for the Tacoma, 4Runner, Tundra, and Sequoia, for example.
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