Our favourite cars of 2024: Toyota GR Yaris Evo

You don’t have to drive fast to have a good time. Case in point: my outing in the revamped Toyota GR Yaris Evo was the most fun I’ve had in a car this year, and I never even got out of second gear. In my defence, I was on a frozen Finnish lake.

That sheet of ice was near Jyväskylä in the 1000 Lakes region, the heartland of Finland’s rallying scene and, handily, home to Toyota’s World Rally Championship team. And it was the perfect canvas on which to experience the capabilities of the Japanese firm’s hot hatch. 

Well, some of its capabilities, at least: if you want to experience the GR Yaris’s mighty acceleration and assured high-speed handling, you’d be better off trying it on a circuit, as my colleague Matt Prior did. But if you want to feel just how pliant, poised and controllable the GR Yaris is, well, you need ice, ice, baby.

And it really is controllable. It didn’t take much practice before I could pitch it into a slide and control it on throttle alone for a surprising amount of time. Of course, it helped that I had a pro-level Finnish rally driver alongside passing on some vague knowledge of Scandinavian flicks and sideways driving – but it helped more that the GR Yaris is just such a wonderfully balanced thing.

With its evocative 1.6-litre turbo engine, it’s hugely potent and pleasingly wild without ever feeling intimidating, and the updates for the facelift (including a better seating position and dashboard layout, and a new auto ’box) marked genuine improvements. 

Even in an unfamiliar environment, I never felt out of my depth – well, at least until Jari-Matti Latvala gave me a passenger ride. It turns out you can drive fast on a frozen ice lake, although my rearranged innards still question if it was more fun.