Toyota’s first racing car –built again from blueprints

Toyota’s chairman Akio Toyoda is a rev head. He believes strongly that motorsport improves the breed and also breeds excitement in his brand. But where did he get it from?

It turns out his grandfather, company founder Kiichiro, had the bug as well.

In 1950 Kiichiro built two open wheel racing cars, the Toyopet Racers, and he planned to drive one himself.

But Kiichiro sadly died, just 57, and his cars disappeared –that is until 2018 when the director of the proposed Fuji Motorsports Museum, Naoki Nunogaki, found the blueprints. It took a power of research just to confirm that such a project had existed and even more to discover that the two cars had long since been lost. Toyota decided to start again.

Building Kiichiro’s racer from scratch became a Toyota passion project.

Teams of young volunteers used modern tools to craft ‘ancient’ technology so the Toyopet Racer could be exactly as Kiichiro intended – a 995cc, 27hp open cockpit racing car based on Toyota’s model SD which was at the time Japan’s most successful taxi.

At the end of 2022 Nunogaki-San opened the spectacular new motorsport museum at the Toyota owned Fuji International Speedway south of Tokyo. And the star of the show was the Toyopet Racer.

It’s doubtful even 70 years ago that the Toyopet Racer would have been an outright winner.

But in Kiichiro’s papers there’s reference to his dream of a 200hp model to take on the world. Perhaps that could be the next project.