Toyota strongly believes in the goodness of the hydrogen combustion engine and continues its development by exploiting the data provided by the world of motorsport: this is the case of the Toyota Corolla GR hydrogenwhich has just completed its second season of racing in the Super Taikyu Series (S-Tai) in Japan – a particular category of motorsport dedicated to carbon-neutral car. In the same category also runs one GR86 fed to synthetic fuel which does not emit CO2.
According to Toyota, in this second racing season its hydrogen Corolla would have significantly improved in terms of performance performance: compared to the first race run, the power output increased by 24% and the30% autonomy. Obviously you can’t just focus on performance, and in fact Toyota is also fine-tuning the technology used to prevent unexpected combustion, with excellent results: compared to the first race run, the cases in which an unexpected combustion occurred have been reduced less than half.
Koji Sato, president of Gazoo Racing (GR) seems very satisfied with the results obtained and does not exclude that these steps forward could be translated into a road engine very soon.
“Problems are easy to identify when you’re using the car to the limit. Once identified, we can think of countermeasures quickly, to be ready for the next race.”
For those who still hope for a future that is not made up only of electric cars, this is very positive news: Toyota has not yet abandoned the idea of moving around using hydrogen and the development of the combustion engine is proceeding apace thanks to this dedicated motorsport category.
Now the goal becomes to improve functionality and reliabilityafter which the focus can be on miniaturizing the tank and increasing theautonomy mileage thanks to the use of hydrogen in liquid form – if this last step is not achievable, due to the technical difficulties in keeping hydrogen in liquid form – Toyota is ready to release a car that uses hydrogen in gaseous form .
