Nichola Beckford/Contributor

The Jamaica Classic Car Club (JCCC) held its Link Up for the month of November at the Super Valu Towne Centre in St Andrew. With the COVID-19 restrictions rescinded earlier this year, the club has been slowly returning to its normal end-of-month event schedule.

Under former president, Shane Angus, and continued by current president Jason Lawson, the JCCC has embraced a wider variety of classic cars and the changing shade of what is considered a classic. This has seen the club expanding its appeal to a new generation, who while still appreciating the older cars, have their own idea of what a classic car is. This has led to the smaller monthly link up events hosting anything from a W203 Mercedes-Benz C 55 AMG to an AP1 Honda S2000. The variety keeps things interesting for passers-by who can relive their childhood motoring memories or spark the imagination of younger automotive enthusiast who may have never before seen their dream car up close and personal.

One segment that has seen a boom is that of the modern classic. This might sound counter-intuitive, however there are new cars that, based on their rarity, technology, or unique qualities, are more or less guaranteed to be as notable as they are now as they will be in the future.

From time to time, it’s the JCCC members who get the surprise, and in this case it was due to a car destined to be a modern classic, the Toyota GR Yaris. This small hatchback Toyota hails back to a moment in time when street legal rally cars were a thing.

While homologation — the act of manufacturers having to make street versions of vehicles they intend to use for a specific class of motorsport, hasn’t gone away it is rare for a company to still do so since 1997, when a rule set change aimed at making it cheaper for automakers to participate was implemented.

Porsche is one of the major companies that still does this for circuit racing. Before 1997, showrooms were blessed with homologation specials the likes of the Subaru Impreza WRX STI, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and even the Ford Escort RS Cosworth – all high performance cars that the average person could aspire to.

For Toyota, their history in rally homologation begins with the Celica GT-Four entering the World Rally Championship (WRC) Group A class in 1988. This created a line of all-wheel drive two-litre turbocharged performance coupés that continued until the rule updates in 1997. The company would switch to the smaller Corolla as a base for next their rally car with no street version available. Two years later Toyota would withdraw from the WRC. The success it had in the sport was too much to ignore, so, in 2017 it returned with an even smaller car, the Yaris hatchback.

Hitting the market in 2020, the GR Yaris has been a hit both commercially and critically, as it draws from a time when there was a direct connect between street and rally stage. Current WRC homologation rules necessitate 2,500 units per year. Toyota has committed to a ten-year production run, so there will only ever be 25,000 of them built.

Using a modified version of the Yaris platform, the GR version gets its performance credentials first from the most powerful three-cylinder engine in the world, making 272bhp from 1.6-litres of displacement and a newly developed all-wheel drive system Toyota calls GR FOUR in homage to the Celica. Even rarer for a modern automobile is the fact that the Yaris is only available with a six-speed manual transmission.

Toyota Jamaica brought what would be one of 5,000 GR Yaris produced to date to the recent JCCC Link Up. While the car been on the island for a few weeks, and has been spotted by social media, this was the first chance for regular folks to get up close and personal with Toyota’s smallest performance car, and it didn’t disappoint.