Toyota Yaris GRMN gets UK debut at CarFest North – UK gets 100 GRMNs

The new Toyota Yaris GRMN has had its UK debut at Chris Evans CarFest North, with a quarter of the allocation of the GRMN coming to the UK.

At the Geneva Motor Show in the spring, the Toyota Yaris GRMN was revealed (although we’d expected it to be the Yaris Gazoo) as a limited run of just 400 hot Yaris aimed at the Fiesta ST. And now it’s had its UK debut.

Making an appearance at Chris Evans’ CarFest North, the Yaris GRMN has now gone on sale in the UK, and out of the 400 units available in Europe a quarter are coming to the UK. But then we do love a hot hatch.

For your £26,295 you get a Yaris that looks suitable sporty, and comes with Toyota’s 1.8 litre supercharged engine good for 209bhp and a hustle to 62mph in 6.3 seconds.

The price is probably a bit more than the new Fiesta ST will be, but the Yaris does have more power and is quicker to 62mph. It’s also going to be a lot rarer.

That powerful little Toyota engine is built at Toyota’s Deeside plant in North Wales – just a few miles up the road from CarFest’s Bolesworth Estate location – although the Yaris is actually built in France for Europe.

Inspired by the Toyota Yaris WRC’s winning return to the World Rally Championship this year, the Yaris GRMN is a great way to go hot hatch without looking like every other hot hatch driver on the road.

Online reservations for the Yaris GRMN have only just opened, but although it looked like they were sold out Toyota tell us the still have a few left. But be quick. 

Getting a quarter of the entire European allocation in the UK clearly wasn’t enough.