Toyota tested the new GR GT3 at the Nürburgring on Friday. Jesse Krohn was at the wheel, and shared his first read on the car with GT REPORT.
With little running behind the programme so far, the 2025 Nürburgring 24 Hours winner was careful not to draw firm conclusions.
“It’s hard to say yet, I mean we haven’t done that much testing,” Krohn told GT REPORT. “It has its strengths and weaknesses but it’s difficult to say, we haven’t really compared it to any other car yet. So there’s still obviously work to do for us. But the baseline is for sure there.”
A learning day in the heat
Asked what the main goal for the day was, Krohn kept it simple.
“Just learn as much as we can, this is a new condition for us, we haven’t driven the car in these temperatures,” the Finn said. “But it’s definitely a challenge for everyone with the tyres. So we just need to learn, we need to learn everything about the car, what it needs for certain conditions and so on. So it’s always when you bring a new car out, there’s a lot of things that you have to go through.”
A lap time of 7:57 has been rumoured from the test, though nothing has been confirmed and Toyota has not released any figures.
Asked when the Toyota GR GT3 might first race, Krohn gave nothing away. “I honestly don’t know, I don’t know.”
Toyota’s clean-sheet GT3
The GR GT3 is Toyota’s clean-sheet successor to the Lexus RC F GT3, not due to make its competition debut before 2027. Developed alongside the road-going GR GT, it runs a newly developed 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 and was shaped from the ground up for GT racing rather than adapted from a production model. Toyota built it around a low centre of gravity, an all-aluminium body frame and an aero-first design process, with testing already logged at Fuji, Shimoyama and the Nürburgring.
KCMG runs the Toyota GR GT3
Friday’s run came with KCMG operating the car, following an earlier test by Krohn’s teammate David Pittard. Their Nürburgring 24 Hours co-drivers Naoya Gamou and Nirei Fukuzumi are Toyota Gazoo Racing drivers, with Gamou also active in testing and developing the Toyota GR.
Photos by Wessel Manden
