Toyota Australia today announced an affordable, grassroots motorsport series based on the country's best-selling sports car, the Toyota 86 coupe, to be raced exclusively at V8 Supercars events.
The series, to start next year, will be run as a pro-am with up to five selected professional drivers who will mentor and compete against a larger field of amateur drivers who will qualify to get onto the starting grid.
The Toyota 86 Pro-Am race series, under the official banner of Toyota Racing Australia, will be staged at selected V8 Supercars events and will be sanctioned by the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport.
The 86 race cars will be based on the GT manual with key specifications controlled to ensure their suitability and reliability while keeping costs as low as possible.
For this new project, Toyota chose a tyre that Dunlop Japan had developed specifically for this wonder Sportscar, the DUNLOP Direzza Z2*86.
The DUNLOP Direzza Z2* is a unique tyre, suitable as a respectable road tyre for normal driving, but has phenomenal performance atributes on the racing circuit. Dunlop engineers have further tweaked this tyre to make it particularly suitable for the Toyota 86 suspension, and it shows with race tyre-like handling properties. In testing this new tyre at Wakefield park, Neal Bates posted 'best ever times' at this circuit. To check if this tyre is available in your size, click on the tyre image below.
An overall summary of tyres used for major tarmac events since 2004 can be viewed HERE