GR Yaris teardown — the world’s first

We get to work on some exciting projects here at HRB, and one of those recently has been Sam Wattam’s GR Yaris project. Five years ago, we met Sam at the Toyota festival at Hampton Downs Motorsport Park. He’s got an epic lineup of Toyotas, including an Indy Car — we hit it off immediately. 

Sam purchased one of the first GR Yaris to be released here in New Zealand, as he was lucky enough to get in on the backorder list. We mentioned to him that we’d love to build an engine for one, and before the engine had done 500 kilometres, it was sitting on our workshop floor ready to be torn down. As nobody had pulled one of these engines apart yet, it was incredibly challenging as everything at this stage had to be custom made.

The piston and rod went straight to CP/Carillo, the valves to Ferrea, and Kelford Cams even flew up to Auckland from Christchurch and spent a day going over the valve train, cam timing, and understanding the engine before it was pulled down.

The team at Kelford took the head back to Christchurch with them to allow them to produce the first billet camshafts available for this engine, along with a valve spring kit. 

As this was peak COVID times, delays plagued the engine build. The custom head and main studs were supplied out of Australia. 

As the engine came out, it was 3D scanned along with the body and engine bay. The body scan is being used to design a custom body kit and the engine scan was used to design the billet intake, as well as the dry sump oiling system. Race Lab is taking on the remainder of the build, fabricating and plumbing everything and mounting the much larger turbo system. 

This is one build we can’t wait to see finished. If it weren’t for COVID, it’d probably be done by now!