TOYOTA HAS A SECOND CRACK AT THE GR YARIS, NOW WITH AN AUTO

TOYOTA WAS SO concerned that it might not be able to sell all of the required 25,000 GR Yarises that it needed for World Rally Championship homologation that it created a cheaper, ordinary version of the three-door car for Japan, called the RS. It comes with the standard Yaris's humdrum 1.5-litre hybrid powertrain and none of the fancy running gear or hardware. They designed it to make up the numbers if the GR Yaris wasn't successful.

- MATT PRIOR

As it is, the good people at Toyota have been taken aback by the little hot hatch's popularity. They've now made 32,000 of them, and counting.

Not only has that justified this facelift, which Toyota didn't imagine it would ever be in a position to produce, but it also means they've now committed to the GR Yaris for the longer haul. So long as Toyota can sell them (not a given in the UK or EU, given emissions limits), it will keep making them.

In the meantime, they've also been rallying and circuit racing it - and discovering its limitations - which have played into this facelift. They've crashed it, melted it, and burnt it so that you don't have to. The headlines are that there's now more power and there's the long-awaited option of an automatic gearbox, but the detail changes run much deeper.

At the front, the bumper is now made in three pieces, rather than one, so that it's quicker to replace a corner if you nerf it off on a racetrack.

The centre section includes a larger cooling aperture, necessary for engine durability, and its grille is now made of metal, rather than plastic, so that debris doesn't burst through it, exposing the radiator to holing the next time it happens.

At the rear, the low-level reversing light has been moved level with the other lights - hot exhausts could and have melted it - and the high-level brake light has been moved from the spoiler to the rear window, because it was upsetting tuners who fitted their own rear wings.

My test cars here are disguised, but I'm told that otherwise the visuals including 18-inch wheels with 225/40 Michelin Pilot Sport 4S rubber - are largely unchanged.

The body changes are ones you can't see. There's a 15 percent increase in the number of spot welds and a 15 percent increase in the adhesive used to stiffen the shell. Weight is unchanged, at 1280kg. The front struts are now more securely mounted by three bolts, rather than one larger one.