You need more than just a lot of speed to drive fast, especially on a road course. It is conducive to be able to send whatever product you have to the ground while doing everything you can to not get in the way. Your work is cut out if you have only 100 horsepower and want to beat a professional driver’s lap time in a modern hot hatch. A Toyota GR Yaris driver from Southern California wanted to see how close he could come to Randy Pobst’s lap time at Streets of Willow. Rassool, on the other hand, drives a second-generation XP90 Yaris with very low gas mileage instead of a high-performance model from the factory. It was clear that the odds were against him. The GR Yaris has more than 250 horsepower and all-wheel drive. A veteran driver drove it with decades of experience in touring and sports car racing. healthy XP90 is far from stock, with coil overs, track-ready brakes, an excellent 1.5-way limited-slip differential, good alignment, most of the interior ripped out, and more. First, it has Falken RT660 tires with tread sizes 205/50 R15. Even though the structure is excellent, pro-driven power is still pro-driven power. Is this true, though? The GR Yaris’s lap was notable because it was done on tires that weren’t up to par and without a limited-slip differential. On the other hand, the XP90 is expected to weigh less than 2,500 pounds, has good tires, and can use an LSD to put most of its 100 horsepower on the road. The results are incredible. Rassool’s best time of 1:29.6X beats Pobst’s best time of 1:28.3X by less than 1.5 seconds. The Streets of Willow track goes in a clockwise way on both of its loops. He thinks the tires are a big reason for his success. In the first Hagerty movie made by Pobst, a GR Corolla with much better tires beats a GR Yaris. A tire with 200 treadwear will almost always last longer than an OEM tire with 280+ treadwear and generally also have better traction. I’ve learned that this is only sometimes the case, though. It’s hard to believe that a small 205-wide Falken, which may have been used to record some track miles earlier, could do such a lap. Because the benefits of rolling resistance don’t outweigh the costs, I could also talk about making sure tires are the right size for the power and weight they push or pull all day. In the real world, not everything is a car. Rassool has driven his Yaris a lot over the years, so he is used to it. In the video’s comments, people discuss ways to improve power, change the rear brakes, and other things. However, he would be better off just fine-tuning his suspension setup. While he’s at it, he could try out different types of tires (without going crazy), add the safety upgrades he mentioned in the video, and continue to lap the car with its pretty stock powertrain. Any GridLife Sundae Cup time attacker or SCCA B-Spec racer will tell you that you don’t need rear discs with this much power. The more you think about the two movies, the more attractive they become. Any way you look, a sub-1:30 time with 100 horsepower on Willow’s repaved streets is fantastic. Also, he’s at a track day, trying to fit in hot laps between expected delays, while Pobst has the place to himself. Rassool’s lap happened just a few days ago, so the temperature could have been higher than when Pobst circled the turbocharged GR more than a month ago. Rassool says in his movie that the next step should be to put Pobst in the Yaris, which gets better gas mileage. Let the legend show you how to drive with power from the ground up.
