TRD drops a pair of wild Toyota GR 86 concepts

Toyota, by way of its performance Toyota Racing Development arm, has unveiled a pair of hotted-up GR 86 concepts. TRD created the pair of street fighters to showcase the parts that TRD is developing for the upcoming second-generation GR 86.

Just a warning before we proceed, though: The names are quite a mouthful. There's the Toyota GR 86 GR Parts and the Toyota GR 86 GR Parts Concept. Yes, the names have multiple instances of "GR" in them, and are separated only by the word "concept." Technically, TRD should be in there somewhere too, it seems.

The former is the road-legal version of TRD's take on Toyota's lightweight, rear-wheel-drive sports coupe. It take the frankly somewhat plain styling of the GR 86 and adds an aggressive front lip, side skirts, and rear bumper. Naturally, there are canards and a rear deck spoiler as well.

Performance-wise, there's no mention of anything under the hood. However, the car has a TRD performance exhaust, adjustable suspension, GR monoblock brake calipers with vented rotors, and thin-spoked 19-inch TRD wheels.

Normally, we don't condone the addition of visual busy-ness, but it'd be a lot more fun to see this thing zipping down the freeway than the stock GR 86. We'd probably pass on that carbon-and-bolts fuel door though.

The second car, the Toyota GR 86 GR Parts Concept, was built as a study for parts development, according to TRD. Here, the engineers weren't limited by street legality and claim to have increased power by customizing the intake and exhaust systems. There's also mention of weight reduction and improved body rigidity, but exactly how that was achieved was not disclosed.

It was designed for track use, and as such it sports an even more aggressive front fascia, with a large ram air inlet on the nose. The canards and lip spoiler take the look of the street car and enlarge everything for more downforce. The hood is flanked by 1.7-inch widebody fenders, and TRD says functional air outlets prevent the air taken from overflowing from under the car, helping create yet more downforce.

Additionally, The size and shape of the outlets were designed to not interrupt the airflow over the top of the car as it heads towards a massive GT wing. Meanwhile, aggressive carbon fiber side skirts split the wind flowing along the car's sides, isolating underbody airflow from the air above. An inlet passing through the 1.7-inch rear flares help add downforce on the driven wheels as well. The rear is finished off with a large functional diffuser for — you guessed it — more downforce.

The 19-inch forged aluminum wheels share the same Y-spoke pattern as those of the street car, but have a much deeper cone to fill out those cavernous flared wheel wells. The cone adds out-of-plane rigidity, TRD says, which allows for a thinner cross-section to avoid unsprung mass.

Toyota says the Concept is just that, but that the research that went into it trickled down to the street car parts. While it's unlikely any of these TRD bits will make it stateside from an official channel, it's good to see the old TRD moniker isn't just being relegated to dress-up parts.

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