Toyota’s innovative hydrogen-powered GR Corolla recently competed during a 24-hour race in Japan as part of the ENEOS Super Taikyu Series 2023. Its 2023 endurance racing debut came just a couple of months after it missed a 5-hour race at Suzuka in mid-March.
This isn’t the first time that the car has completed a 24-hour race as it also ran at the same event back in mid-2021. Toyota chairman and former chief executive Akio Toyoda formed part of the team of drivers that raced the car in what the automaker says was a test of its technology.
The GR Corolla used by Toyota is interesting as it features the same basic 1.6-liter turbocharged three-cylinder engine of the consumer versions of the GR Yaris and GR Corolla but rather than gasoline, is powered by liquid hydrogen stored in four carbon fiber fuel tanks. While this wasn’t the first time the GR Corolla has raced with a hydrogen-fueled combustion engine, the car used in 2021 had gaseous hydrogen fuel, rather than liquid hydrogen.
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Part of the liquid hydrogen used in the car was produced in Australia and Toyota had to transport a mobile liquid hydrogen fueling station to the circuit. The use of liquid hydrogen has reduced complexity as the team no longer needed the compressors and pre-coolers for cooling hydrogen that it used previously. Toyota says that the car’s cruising range has been more than doubled with the switch to liquid hydrogen and that it only takes 1.5 minutes to fill the GR Corolla.
One of the challenges of using liquid hydrogen is that it must be kept at temperatures lower than -253℃ during filling and storage, necessitating the development of new fuel pump technology that can work in such low-temperature environments.