The 2025 Toyota GR Corolla is a little like a house cat that can take down a moose. It’s a 3-foot-tall third grader who can keep up with Usain Bolt in the 100-meter dash. It’s Spider-Man — a skinny high school kid with unexpected Hulk-like strength.
Some animal behaviorists theorize that certain sheep guard dogs — Komodors, the ones that look like 200-pound string mops — protect sheep from wolves because they believe the sheep are their dog pack. They defend the pack and wonder why the other “dogs” aren’t jumping in with their fangs out, too.
I thought of these dogs as I sat at a stoplight in the 2025 Toyota GR Corolla, poised between two ordinary Corolla examples. Yeah, we’re all in the Corolla family here. Let’s all pull away from this light, doing a zero-to-60 sprint in under five seconds. We’re all the same animal.
In truth, they could do it in about 9 seconds. A guard dog is not a sheep, no matter how much it looks like the part. It’s all muscle and tooth under the moppy fur. And the GR Corolla is not a basic economy car you buy for resale value. It’s all snarl and grip.
The GR Corolla, if you’re not familiar with it, is a bit of an automotive joke courtesy of the engineers at Toyota’s Gazoo Racing division and their playful leader, Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda.
It uses the chassis of the brand’s affordable compact car, the only car in history with 50 million copies sold. Racing engineers have used every trick in their magic bag to turn the GR version into a track day performance car.
Toyota loaned me a GR Corolla Premium with a 6-speed manual transmission in a boring gray called “Heavy Metal.” The car’s only options were a chassis brace behind the rear seats to stiffen the body and a set of floor mats. It retails for $48,144 after a $1,135 destination fee – a lot for a Corolla, but cheap for a track day car and an injection of youth’s joy and invincibility.
The Numbers and How They Feel
The GR Corolla gets 300 horsepower from a 1.6-liter turbocharged 3-cylinder engine. There are other engines that produce 100 hp per cylinder — but there aren’t many.
Power goes through whichever of two transmissions you choose. My tester had a short-throw 6-speed manual transmission with an appropriately heavy but not overweighted clutch. A button on the center console activates rev matching for those lovable downshift blips. The other option is an 8-speed automatic with paddle shifters, which I did not get to try.
In either case, you get an adjustable all-wheel drive (AWD) system that lets you dial in how much power you want sent to each axle. Add in front and rear Torsen limited-slip differentials, and you have an absurd amount of grip in a little hatchback.
It begs for track time, and I didn’t get any. But in highway driving and on the curviest roads I could find, the 2025 GR Corolla feels gloriously grippy. It feels like it’s made of contact patch, much like the smallest BMW M cars often do.
A Performance Car, Not a Simulation of One
Over the past decade, many automakers have adopted a deception that car enthusiasts have learned to live with — fake engine noise. Many of today’s performance cars sound better inside than out because the engine noise is coming from the speakers. It’s fake.
Toyota couldn’t quite resist this temptation with the GR Corolla. It uses the speakers to boost engine noise inside the cabin. But, crucially, the engine still sounds a smooth rumble from outside the cabin. This little overpowered engine sounds fantastic even at idle. It’s not obnoxiously loud, but it hums with purpose in a way some rivals, well, fake.
Drive modes include Sport, Normal, and Eco. I assume the latter two are some sort of dummy switch no one ever uses.
Corolla-Like? Yeah. Sorta.
Stopped between those two Corolla LE models, the GR does look the part.
A roofline spoiler, brake vents, a unique front fascia, and lower side skirts set it apart. But the shape is recognizably Corolla Hatchback, which may be the single most entertaining thing about the car.
High-tech racing bits like a carbon fiber roof and that big air-hogging vent keep it from being a true sleeper. People next to you in traffic know you’re in something special. But you know you’re in a Corolla. A Corolla that can outrun most cars.
That’s fun.
The cabin, too, dresses up its humble origins instead of hiding them. GR bucket seats are wrapped in grippy Ultrasuede (keep them clean to begin with because you don’t want to have to scrub these). A simple driver interface gives you a boost meter that no normal Corolla has.
Aluminum pedals and a leather-wrapped shifter look sporty. But everything is in the same place it would be in a bargain-priced Corolla LE.
A Daily Driver With … Skills
Ultimately, that is the best thing about the 2025 Toyota GR Corolla. This is a silly car, in the best way. It looks like America’s favorite economy car because it is, under the skin, a Toyota Corolla. It’s just a Toyota Corolla that can hold its own with small AMGs and M cars in an autocross.
There’s ultimately a small audience for a product like that. But I’m firmly in it, and I deeply appreciated my week in the GR. This may be the most fun Toyota engineers have ever had at work, and the car they built is a pure joy.
