The 1998 Toyota GT-One was the most insane street-legal Toyota ever made and our exclusive digital render brings it to the modern age.
Toyota is renowned for making extremely reliable cars that’ll last you a lifetime. But the carmaker has also come up with some pretty epic performance cars that can knock your socks off. The brand got everyone’s fancy with the fourth-gen Supra. Its latest line-up of high-octane vehicles, like the GR86 and the GR Corolla, is also downright amazing. But one car in Toyota’s history easily tops any vehicle that has ever rolled out of its factory floor. You would be right to call it the ‘wildest street-legal Toyota’ ever made. The insane machine that we are referring to is the 1998 GT-One!
It’s the road-going version of Toyota’s GT1 Class racer for Le Mans 1998. Two examples were built to meet the homologation rules to participate in the 24-hours endurance championship. Toyota couldn’t achieve success on track that year with the race-spec GT-Ones. But the attempt gave the world these two unicorns that are currently in possession of the carmaker itself.
Our in-house 3D animator Rostislav Prokop has created this breathtaking rendering of what a modern-day street-legal Toyota GT-One would look like. And there are many reasons why we’d love to race it in the fantastic virtual world of Forza Horizon 5.
There are a lot of cool hypercars that you can own in Forza Horizon 5. Adding this GT-One to that eclectic mix will double up the fun. It’s pure joy driving around in the virtual streets of Mexico in a Bugatti Chiron or Rimac Nevera. So you can imagine how epic it will be to experience this road version of Toyota’s GT1 Class racer in the game. It’ll fit right in just like the original GT-One road car that also made a virtual appearance in Grand Tourismo. It was the only way you could own this beast, as Toyota never put the actual street-legal versions up for sale to the public.
There weren’t many differences between the street-legal 1998 GT-One and the GT1 racer that raced at Le Mans. That’s because the homologation rules at that time required manufacturers to build an actual road-going version of the race car instead of just sharing a few parts with it. As a result, the GT-One turned out to be just as extreme as its Le Mans racing counterpart. It had a bunch of aggressive aero and sat so low to the ground that it would be virtually undrivable on public roads. Prokop’s rendering is close to what a modern-day GT-One would look like, as it’s just as intense as the original car.
Like in the real world, there is always a battle for the fastest car in the virtual world too. Currently, the Hennessey Venom F5 is the fastest car in Forza Horizon 5. But if this Toyota GT-One makes it to the popular racing game, it’ll likely snatch that title from Hennessey’s hypercar. Both the examples of the 1998 GT-One had the same engine as the GT1 Le Mans racer – a 6.3-liter twin-turbocharged V8. Toyota never officially revealed the power output of this engine. But it’s widely believed that the road-going GT-One produced north of 600 horsepower.
If this render ever becomes a reality and makes it to Forza Horizon 5, it’ll need a powerful engine to take on the Venom F5’s 6.6-liter V8 that produces 1817 horsepower. Our pick would be the 3.5-liter twin-turbocharged Hybrid V6 out of Toyota’s current Le Mans competitor, the GR010-Hybrid. It produces a combined power output of 939 horsepower. It’s down on power compared to the Venom F5, but the GT-One’s lightweight construction will make up for the difference. It would be epic to see these two cars battle it out on the streets of Forza.
In the 1990s, the homologation requirements for a GT1 class competitor at Le Mans specified that it had to have a road-going version. But the rules didn’t mention how many units had to be made, and the teams exploited this loophole. Toyota only built two units of the street-legal GT-One, codenamed TS020. Since the rules also didn’t mention a specific deadline for selling them to the public, the carmaker kept both to itself. So owning a GT-One isn’t possible. However, if one ever went up for sale, it’ll likely have a similar price to its nearest competitor, the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR.
According to Classic.com, the average selling price of a CLK GTR (1998 – 1999) is $4.5 million. That’s high, considering that Mercedes made multiple units of this hypercar. A 1998 GT-One will likely command a much higher price in an auction since only two examples currently exist.
