TRD vs. Toyota Gazoo Racing vs. Toyota Racing: What’s the Difference?
Why does Toyota have so many racing divisions? And what do they all do?
Toyota has entered its cars in racing events since the company’s earliest days, and after nearly 70 years of competition it’s rebranding most of its racing under the name Toyota Gazoo Racing. What does Gazoo mean, and how does this rebranding affect the more familiar TRD and Toyota Racing divisions? Why does Toyota have three different racing arms, anyway? It’s a bit complicated, but we have you covered if you’ve wondered what this is all about.
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What Is TRD?
Toyota’s most familiar racing department is also its oldest. TRD stands for Toyota Racing Development, though when it first opened in 1957 it was called Toyota Sports Corner, or TOSCO for short. Toyota didn’t get serious about racing until the 1970s, and when it did, it renamed the division TRD in 1976. Based in Japan, it opened its American division in 1979 with an eye toward off-road truck racing. Since then, it’s also handled Toyota road racing, Lexus racing, and Scion racing (before Toyota shuttered the latter brand).
TRD has been responsible for designing, building, and campaigning race cars in off-road racing, drifting, drag racing, sports car racing, and NASCAR. The division also develops high-performance versions of Toyota production cars and aftermarket performance parts. (Lexus F and F Sport production cars are developed by Lexus in Japan.)
With Toyota Gazoo Racing’s new expansion into the U.S., drag racing, sports car racing, NASCAR, and drifting teams will change names from TRD to Toyota Gazoo Racing. The TRD name will continue to appear in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and off-road truck racing, and TRD will continue to develop TRD-branded Toyota vehicles and aftermarket parts. TRD will also provide engineering support for Lexus racing in the U.S.
Back home, TRD Japan is now a part of Toyota Gazoo Racing.
What Is Toyota Racing?
Before Toyota went all in on TRD, it supported racing around the world in a piecemeal fashion. In the early 1970s, Toyota supported Sweden-based Andersson Motorsport in rally racing. Toyota in 1973 made it a factory works team in the FIA World Rally Championship and competed in the series for two decades under the name Toyota Team Europe. In 1993, Toyota bought out Andersson Motorsport (but kept all its staff), moved the headquarters to Germany, and changed the name to Toyota Racing GmbH.
Unlike TRD and Gazoo Racing, Toyota Racing was a race shop only. It designed, built, and campaigned race cars but did not meddle with street cars. It competes in rally racing, sports car racing/endurance racing—where it runs Toyota’s successful Le Mans prototype program—and handled Toyota’s F1 team in the early 2000s. It was renamed Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe in 2020.
What Is Toyota Gazoo Racing?
The relative newcomer of the company’s racing divisions, Toyota Gazoo Racing was formed in 2007 under the name Team Gazoo. The English spelling of the Japanese word gazo translates roughly to “picture” or “image.” It originally came from a plan to use pictures of cars on the company’s early website in the mid-1990s as a then-revolutionary sales tactic (the site was literally gazoo.com), but it later came to symbolize the visions company employees had in their heads of garages full of different kinds of street cars and race cars. (Fun fact: The Japanese word for “garage” is gareji, a phonetic interpretation of the English word.)
Team Gazoo wasn’t an official project at first. It began as an independent team made up of Toyota employees running outdated Toyota Altezza (Lexus IS in America) sedans in European sports car racing, particularly at Germany’s Nürburgring. This wasn’t just a couple of enthusiasts using their company knowledge for a little weekend racing, though. Among the groups founders were Toyota test driver and racing driver Hiromu Naruse and then–vice president and current board chair Akio Toyoda. In addition to the Gazoo name, the team also created nicknames for its drivers when entering races to obscure their identities and their connections to Toyota. Akio Toyoda’s is Morizo, which is now a trim level on the Toyota GR Corolla he personally helped develop.
Team Gazoo didn’t stay a secret for long within the walls of Toyota, and by 2009 the renamed Gazoo Racing was developing production cars and race cars at the Nürburgring. In 2015, Toyota dropped the charade and renamed it Toyota Gazoo Racing. It also took over Lexus Racing to create Lexus Gazoo Racing. Even that didn’t last long, and in 2017 it was turned into an autonomous but wholly owned subsidiary of Toyota and rebranded one final time as Toyota Gazoo Racing.
Today, Gazoo has taken over for Toyota Racing in Europe and partially taken over for TRD in the U.S., and it’s responsible for designing, building, and campaigning race cars in rallying and sports car/endurance racing for both Toyota Gazoo Racing and Lexus Gazoo Racing. It has also announced a technical partnership with the Haas F1 team but is not reentering F1 as a constructor. Toyota Gazoo Racing is also responsible for developing production cars under the GR, GRMN (Gazoo Racing, Masters of the Nürburgring), and GR-Sport brands globally, as well as developing aftermarket performance parts for production cars.
Were you one of those kids who taught themselves to identify cars at night by their headlights and taillights? I was. I was also one of those kids with a huge box of Hot Wheels and impressive collection of home-made Lego hot rods. I asked my parents for a Power Wheels Porsche 911 for Christmas for years, though the best I got was a pedal-powered tractor. I drove the wheels off it. I used to tell my friends I’d own a “slug bug” one day. When I was 15, my dad told me he would get me a car on the condition that I had to maintain it. He came back with a rough-around-the-edges 1967 Volkswagen Beetle he’d picked up for something like $600. I drove the wheels off that thing, too, even though it was only slightly faster than the tractor. When I got tired of chasing electrical gremlins (none of which were related to my bitchin’ self-installed stereo, thank you very much), I thought I’d move on to something more sensible. I bought a 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT and got my first speeding ticket in that car during the test drive. Not my first-ever ticket, mind you. That came behind the wheel of a Geo Metro hatchback I delivered pizza in during high school. I never planned to have this job. I was actually an aerospace engineering major in college, but calculus and I had a bad breakup. Considering how much better my English grades were than my calculus grades, I decided to stick to my strengths and write instead. When I made the switch, people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I’d like to write for a car magazine someday, not expecting it to actually happen. I figured I’d be in newspapers, maybe a magazine if I was lucky. Then this happened, which was slightly awkward because I grew up reading Car & Driver, but convenient since I don’t live in Michigan. Now I just try to make it through the day without adding any more names to the list of people who want to kill me and take my job.
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