The American Haas F1 Team announced on Thursday that the team’s name will change for next season. From next season onwards, the team will compete in Formula One under the name TGR Haas F1 Team.
The abbreviation TGR naturally comes from the words Toyota Gazoo Racing. Under that name, Toyota has competed in various motorsport series, and it has of course become especially well known from the World Rally Championship.
Toyota and Haas signed a cooperation agreement already last year. Since then, the TGR name has appeared on Haas’s F1 cars, but now the name will be highlighted even more clearly.
At the centre of the cooperation between Toyota and Haas has been the so-called TPC programme, through which several Japanese drivers have been able to test Haas’s older F1 cars. At the same time, Toyota has been building a driving simulator in cooperation with Haas at the F1 team’s headquarters in Britain.
Now the cooperation is deepening further. According to the statement, Toyota and Haas will from now on jointly develop personnel expertise, for example in terms of drivers, engineers and mechanics.
However, the Haas F1 Team will continue with Ferrari customer engines, and the Toyota agreement will operate alongside the contract signed with Ferrari.
What makes the news interesting from a Finnish perspective is that Kalle Rovanperä, who has won two World Rally Championship titles with Toyota, will begin pursuing his F1 dream next year. Rovanperä will take part in the Japanese Super Formula series next season with strong support from Toyota.
With the deepened cooperation between Haas and Toyota, Rovanperä’s path towards the pinnacle of the F1 world has again become one step easier.
Haas has competed in the F1 series since 2016. The team’s success in the series has so far remained very modest, as none of the team’s drivers has achieved a podium finish in nearly ten years. This season, the team’s cars have been driven by Frenchman Esteban Ocon and British driver Oliver Bearman.
The 2025 F1 season will conclude next weekend in Abu Dhabi. Before the final race weekend, Haas is eighth in the Constructors’ Championship, with only Kick Sauber and the utterly dismal Alpine behind them.
Toyota had its own team in the F1 series from 2002 to 2009. Among the Finns, Mika Salo also competed for the team, but he was sacked midway through Toyota’s first F1 season in 2002.
