Thought you might be interested in the thoughts of Steve Sutcliffe (a highly regarded car jounalist) writing for The Intercooler this week ..
"The power of the crowd should never be underestimated, as anyone who’s watched Gladiator will attest. Sometimes the crowd can be brutal in its judgement, while other times it gets carried away becoming quite irrational in its thoughts.
But argue with the crowd at your peril – because if you criticise the crowd and it disagrees, you’ll end up as cat food. Either actually or figuratively, depending upon which century you inhabit.
Will I be thrown to the lions for daring to criticise a car about which the crowd, or certainly the motoring press (more accurately described as a rabble) has been so universal in its praise? I’m not sure, but let’s see. As the kid in the Dr Pepper advert used to say: ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’
I’ve driven the GR Yaris on many occasions, in all sorts of weather and on a variety of roads and tracks, and I’m sorry if this offends anyone but…I don’t get it. I just don’t understand what all the fuss is about. I’m cowering now because I can hear the boos starting to rise. The crowd can be vicious when it turns.
For starters, I have a big problem with its driving position. The base of the seat is set at least two, if not three inches too high, meaning you need to stab down onto the pedals rather than press towards them from your hips. The seat itself also has inadequate side support, so you end up desperately clinging to the steering wheel in corners rather than leaning into the side bolsters. Which is one of the very best ways to not control a car very well when driving quickly.
Second, it doesn’t go as hard as I want it to in a straight line. Nowhere near hard enough, in fact. Neither does it make enough noise. Nor does its chassis feel as sharp or incisive as I want whenever I give it something to think about.
Instead – and this is something the crowd is in total agreement on, and goes into a collective frenzy about – it rides really well.
Why?
I couldn’t care less if the GR Yaris floats like the proverbial butterfly whenever it encounters a bumpy road. I want eyeball-bursting turn-in response and cheek-rippling grip from a car as ‘focused’ as this when I drive it along a favourite B-road – to a point where it should even feel a bit edgy if I overcook it on the way into a corner. The ride quality of a luxury saloon? In a car like this?
Neither am I remotely fussed if the dampers operate in three or thirty three different stages; if the car they’re attached to doesn’t make your heart thump and your pupils dilate a little when you aim its nose at a third gear right-hander – and hit the very blade of grass you were aiming at due to the purity and precision of its chassis – what compensation is it that its suspension is surprisingly supple?
I want the GR Yaris to sting like a very angry bee. I want it to make every inch of every journey feel like a momentous event; an achievement even. And if that means it’s not all that comfortable on a long journey and lacks some refinement, fine, I’ll put up with that. So long as it feels like a controlled maniac at 10/10ths I’m happy. Full bore, flat-out lunacy is what I want from a car like this, not a well-equipped interior and a high end stereo – because I can get those things in any well resolved hot hatchback on any other day of the week.
Also, let’s talk about the gearchange. What I’d like most in the GR is a dual-clutch paddleshift gearbox that has the same violent precision of a Porsche 911 GT3’s PDK; one that makes the hairs on your neck feel like they might fall out as it explodes from one ratio to the next. And if that’s not possible due to expense, then at the very least I’d like a manual gearchange with some serious snap to it. And a clutch that’s light and whose weighting is beautifully in sync with that of the gearshift, and with the inertia of the crankshaft. A bit like the gearbox in a Civic Type R (any of them).
But what you get in the Yaris is a short-ish but rubbery gearshift, a clutch that feels clumsily inept on upshifts and which drags occasionally on downshifts, plus a peculiar absence of mechanical feel in the transmission – call it a numbness – that makes changing gear something you need to do, not something you choose to do, just for the heck of it.
At this point the rabble will be in a state of apoplexy, I’ve no doubt. They will be screaming words like ‘homologation’ and shouting numbers like 25,000 into their screens, asking who do I think I am, and what should I expect from a mass-produced road car?
But look, I get there were factors holding Toyota back when it was concocting the recipe for the GR Yaris. I understand that engineering compromise is inevitable, even in cars such as this. But surely those factors could have been navigated with a little bit more panache? Surely Toyota could have honed this car’s edge still further? Surely they could have turned it into the madman it so clearly wants to be?
Or maybe not. In successfully making it so usable as an everyday car, I honestly believe Toyota forgot to unleash the GR’s inner nutcase. The resulting car I find curiously unsatisfying to drive, on road or track.
As for it being ‘The most exciting Toyota there’s ever been’ and a car that ‘smashes it out of the park’, don’t believe the hype. The GR86 is twice as good a Toyota as the GR Yaris. The crowd has become carried away and got this car wrong, I believe. As crowds (and rabbles) quite often do."
"The power of the crowd should never be underestimated, as anyone who’s watched Gladiator will attest. Sometimes the crowd can be brutal in its judgement, while other times it gets carried away becoming quite irrational in its thoughts.
But argue with the crowd at your peril – because if you criticise the crowd and it disagrees, you’ll end up as cat food. Either actually or figuratively, depending upon which century you inhabit.
Will I be thrown to the lions for daring to criticise a car about which the crowd, or certainly the motoring press (more accurately described as a rabble) has been so universal in its praise? I’m not sure, but let’s see. As the kid in the Dr Pepper advert used to say: ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’
I’ve driven the GR Yaris on many occasions, in all sorts of weather and on a variety of roads and tracks, and I’m sorry if this offends anyone but…I don’t get it. I just don’t understand what all the fuss is about. I’m cowering now because I can hear the boos starting to rise. The crowd can be vicious when it turns.
For starters, I have a big problem with its driving position. The base of the seat is set at least two, if not three inches too high, meaning you need to stab down onto the pedals rather than press towards them from your hips. The seat itself also has inadequate side support, so you end up desperately clinging to the steering wheel in corners rather than leaning into the side bolsters. Which is one of the very best ways to not control a car very well when driving quickly.
Second, it doesn’t go as hard as I want it to in a straight line. Nowhere near hard enough, in fact. Neither does it make enough noise. Nor does its chassis feel as sharp or incisive as I want whenever I give it something to think about.
Instead – and this is something the crowd is in total agreement on, and goes into a collective frenzy about – it rides really well.
Why?
I couldn’t care less if the GR Yaris floats like the proverbial butterfly whenever it encounters a bumpy road. I want eyeball-bursting turn-in response and cheek-rippling grip from a car as ‘focused’ as this when I drive it along a favourite B-road – to a point where it should even feel a bit edgy if I overcook it on the way into a corner. The ride quality of a luxury saloon? In a car like this?
Neither am I remotely fussed if the dampers operate in three or thirty three different stages; if the car they’re attached to doesn’t make your heart thump and your pupils dilate a little when you aim its nose at a third gear right-hander – and hit the very blade of grass you were aiming at due to the purity and precision of its chassis – what compensation is it that its suspension is surprisingly supple?
I want the GR Yaris to sting like a very angry bee. I want it to make every inch of every journey feel like a momentous event; an achievement even. And if that means it’s not all that comfortable on a long journey and lacks some refinement, fine, I’ll put up with that. So long as it feels like a controlled maniac at 10/10ths I’m happy. Full bore, flat-out lunacy is what I want from a car like this, not a well-equipped interior and a high end stereo – because I can get those things in any well resolved hot hatchback on any other day of the week.
Also, let’s talk about the gearchange. What I’d like most in the GR is a dual-clutch paddleshift gearbox that has the same violent precision of a Porsche 911 GT3’s PDK; one that makes the hairs on your neck feel like they might fall out as it explodes from one ratio to the next. And if that’s not possible due to expense, then at the very least I’d like a manual gearchange with some serious snap to it. And a clutch that’s light and whose weighting is beautifully in sync with that of the gearshift, and with the inertia of the crankshaft. A bit like the gearbox in a Civic Type R (any of them).
But what you get in the Yaris is a short-ish but rubbery gearshift, a clutch that feels clumsily inept on upshifts and which drags occasionally on downshifts, plus a peculiar absence of mechanical feel in the transmission – call it a numbness – that makes changing gear something you need to do, not something you choose to do, just for the heck of it.
At this point the rabble will be in a state of apoplexy, I’ve no doubt. They will be screaming words like ‘homologation’ and shouting numbers like 25,000 into their screens, asking who do I think I am, and what should I expect from a mass-produced road car?
But look, I get there were factors holding Toyota back when it was concocting the recipe for the GR Yaris. I understand that engineering compromise is inevitable, even in cars such as this. But surely those factors could have been navigated with a little bit more panache? Surely Toyota could have honed this car’s edge still further? Surely they could have turned it into the madman it so clearly wants to be?
Or maybe not. In successfully making it so usable as an everyday car, I honestly believe Toyota forgot to unleash the GR’s inner nutcase. The resulting car I find curiously unsatisfying to drive, on road or track.
As for it being ‘The most exciting Toyota there’s ever been’ and a car that ‘smashes it out of the park’, don’t believe the hype. The GR86 is twice as good a Toyota as the GR Yaris. The crowd has become carried away and got this car wrong, I believe. As crowds (and rabbles) quite often do."
