Some Engineers At Toyota Took What Car Racing?

Toyota’s North American Engineers picked an odd car to race, but it worked out well.

Let’s face it. If you work at Toyota North America (which is also Lexus in case that isn’t obvious), and you want to grab one of the cars from the fleet to take racing the obvious choice is the new Toyota 86, formerly the Scion FR-S. Go hunting for Miatas and GTIs. Or, if you’re a hot shoe and the boss added an extra comma to the budget by mistake, pull a Lexus RC F off the line and take that beast to chase down some BMW M4s and Camaros.

That’s not what these knuckleheads did. Instead they grabbed the keys to a Toyota Corolla iM (formerly the Scion iM) and went and kicked some butt at a rally.

The Scion iM is a hachback now added into the Corolla line. It’s a fun little car, but it is made for economy and practicality, not catching air off jumps and running through streams. After one trial run at a rally with a completely stock iM, Crew Chief and Driver/Co-Driver Kyle Steinkampnot and teammate Colin Ravenscroft ran the Rally America’s Ojibwe Forests Rally.

The changes they made to the iM included some protective cladding underneath and other rally-car tricks like raising up the car a bit by pilfering some other Toyota model parts at work. Don’t tell anyone.

The result was a podium finish. Next, the team is off to a race this October in Houghton, Mich., at the Lake Superior Performance Rally (LSPR). These crazy kids plan to run the iM alongside the Toyota Rally RAV4 of Ryan Millen. Unless they all get fired for stealing parts.