This year at the Camping World Drag Racing Series races, fans will see signage all over for “Toyota Gazoo” or “Toyota Gazoo Racing.” 

Just exactly what does that mean, “Gazoo?” 

Toyota Racing representative Lisa Hughes Kennedy had the answer. 

She said, “’Gazoo’ [pronounced GAH-zoo] translated from Japanese means image or photograph. 

“Ultimately, what happened is our president Akio Toyoda, who is a master driver in his own right. Growing up with some of his friends in Japan, they would pin aspirational photographs of performance vehicles that they wanted or that they wanted to aspire to build to own. So, Gazoo was born. It was aspirational performance vehicles that are now coming to life on the racetrack and on the street,” she said. 

Autocar.com reporter Matt Burt asked Toyota’s motorsport boss, Koei Saga, to explain the concept. He said what he gleaned from the conversation was “essentially an extrapolation of Toyota’s engineers having a picture in their minds of ‘a lot of garages filled with individual and unique cars.’ For Toyota, ‘gazoo’ came to mean ‘garage.’” 

Saga told Burt, “So we combined those two images. And the ultimate goal of the various garages, each with a different focus, is to create better cars.”

Burt wrote that Saga “laughed and admitted that he had to refer to a pre-prepared answer, because the explanation might lose a little in translation from Japanese to English. The very origin is a Japanese word, ‘gazo’, which means ‘picture’ or ‘image’,’ he told me. Almost 20 years ago our president wanted to change the structure of our company, and he introduced what at the time was a very new online system using images of cars for the reselling of used cars. They called this internet site gazoo.com, using the English spelling of the word.”

Hughes Kennedy said, “Toyota Gazoo Racing North America is the new performance brand for Toyota, if you will. So it will be the sole brand for NHRA, all of our Top Fuel entries and all of our Funny Car entries, as well as in our Formula Drift program that races around the country [and] the GT4 program and SRO and IMSA. So those are the three platforms that TGR North America will live in. 

“What is it? That's what everybody wants to know,” she said. “It's ultimately the pinnacle of performance for Toyota. So we've started to introduce new vehicles: the GRSupra, the GR 86. In order to earn the GR badge for a vehicle, it has to meet the pinnacles of performance. It means it is not born in a boardroom. It was born on a racetrack. 

“That car has gone through everything it needs to go through to prove itself as a high-performing vehicle,” Hughes Kennedy said. “So what better place than NHRA to come and showcase the GR Supra Funny Car, which is obviously the pinnacle of performance over here? Also, our GR brands are basically for enthusiasts. So it's enthusiasts and our engineer enthusiasts that work at Toyota that are responsible for these GR performance vehicles. Those enthusiasts are the ones that are going to come out here to the racetrack, and they're going to see performance at the highest standard, and they're going to, in turn, be able to take that information back and eventually work that into new GR vehicles, new GR cars that’ll come down the line from a production perspective. So it all ties together. 

“What better place than NHRA to have enthusiast-inspired vehicles on full display for enthusiasts that ultimately are out here to ‘hot-rod up’ their own cars and make their own cars as good as they can?” she said.