Walkinshaw provides new insight into Toyota development, 2025 balance

Walkinshaw Andretti United co-owner Ryan Walkinshaw has provided the latest update on the development of the Toyota GR Supra as it's on-track debut edges closer.

Walkinshaw revealed in Townsville that the first Supra is set to begin testing by the end of August, with WAU to field two cars for incumbents Chaz Mostert and Ryan Wood.

Toyota will field a total of six cars in the 2026 Repco Supercars Championship, with Brad Jones Racing being announced to run their traditional four-car model with the Japanese make back in May.

After Townsville, Walkinshaw flew to Melbourne amid a busy international schedule, viewing the Walkinshaw Group's new headquarters that are scheduled to open next month, as well as the Toyota development.

"I was in Australia last week for the Townsville event, and dropped down to Melbourne for a few days afterwards to go and see the new facility and have a few meetings," said Walkinshaw on the Rusty's Garage podcast.

"One of the main reasons I wanted to go down there was to go and see where we are with the prototype, and it's coming along well.

"It's very nearly ready to go, it's got a dummy engine in, engines are still in the process of being developed, but we're hoping to have the prototype hitting the track in the next four to six weeks, which is very, very exciting."

Whilst the Toyota program is about to hit the track for the first time in coming weeks, Walkinshaw has remained fully committed to securing a championship for Ford in their final season of partnership.

Since joining the Blue Oval in 2023, WAU and Mostert have arguably been the leading light for Ford, with the 33-year-old nearly making a championship run midway through 2024 before fading to third at seasons end.

However, Walkinshaw said that he had grown frustrated with the package developed by Dick Johnson Racing, and that regaining homologation status was a key milestone for the team.

Walkinshaw admitted that it has been an enormous strain on WAU to run two concurrent programs, however reinforced that focus must remain on the crew's respective tasks in the second half of the season.

"It's an enormous program on it's own, but when you're also trying to dovetail that program with a competitive attack on the Supercars Championship, that's when it becomes really, really complicated because we are still small teams in Supercars.

"You only have a certain amount of people you can allocate to going racing and also developing a program like this, so the amount of work that goes into it is really enormous. You're already working at maximum capacity pretty much just running the normal Supercars season to try and be competitive.

"All of a sudden you've got to take 50% of their time that normally would be allocated to making sure our cars are fast on track, and say, "Ok, but now you actually need to go and develop this new race car for next year, and it needs to be perfect.'

"It needs to be reliable and competitive, particularly with the Toyota brand associated with it, it's a huge operation.

The strength of WAU's engineering group have allowed for the team to provisionally sit both Mostert and Wood in the top 10 in points despite the Toyota development as the race for The Finals heats up across Ipswich, The Bend, and Bathurst.

Whilst Walkinshaw revealed that it hasn't been entirely smooth sailing for WAU in developing the Supra, the team factored any potential delays into their timelines, with the project remaining on schedule.

"Fortunately we've got some really, really good people. Carl Faux has been leading the program with a little skunkworks team of a couple of the guys, and it's been really, really successful so far in what we've aimed to accomplish.

"There have been a couple of delays, as is always the case with these things, but fortunately we always put in enough fat in the program to make sure that we manage to hit our timelines at the end.

"We're very comfortable, everything is moving pretty much on track, and we're really excited to actually get the car on track and start testing it, and I think it should be quite exciting for the fans to actually see the first GR Supra zooming around a racetrack for the first time, and I'm pretty excited about that too."