What happens when a racing driver sets up a crossover?

Hiroyuki Koba passes his iPhone across the table to me. On the screen is a picture of a Toyota C-HR racing car. It’s VLN-spec, wearing slick tyres, lightweight wheels, a surfboard rear wing and a splitter so enormous it could deputise as a dining table.

“I’m racing it for the first time at the Nürburgring this weekend”, he smiles in cheery, broken English. “But it’s going to rain. Or snow”. He checks the forecast. “Yes, look here. Thursday – rain, Friday – rain, Saturday – er… what is this?”

Koba-san points at the lightning bolt symbol on the phone. “That’s ‘thunderstorm’, in English”, I reply warily. “Oh, right. Good!” He returns to swiping through his gallery of photographs, most of which appear to be a selection of aero-laden racing cars he’s campaigned in Japan. Meet the chap who’s just set up Toyota’s new crossover.

Here’s the background. Toyota has a bonkers-looking small SUV coming out later this year. It’s called the C-HR, and it’s Toyota’s rival to the likes of the Vauxhall Mokka, Nissan Juke, and Audi Q3.

Toyota’s waited this long to get in on the crowd-pleasing act because it wanted the car to sit on a new platform. Specifically the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA) that forms the basis of the latest Prius.

But the C-HR isn’t just a Prius is a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume. It’s got a higher hip-point, but wider tracks, a chopped roof and bigger wheels. The wheelbase is shorter too.

And here’s the nub: Toyota doesn’t just want to boss the competition on Marmite styling, which did rather well for the Juke. It wants you to find the C-HR genuinely fun to drive. Which is why it’s let a racing driver – not an accountant – sign off the chassis.

We’re going for a ride in a prototype C-HR shortly, but first Koba-san, who’s officially Deputy Chief Engineer at Toyota, hits us with a few quick-fire anecdotes about the C-HR’s lengthy and complicated birth.

“We always knew we would develop the C-HR in Europe, because that’s where the majority will sell”, Koba-san explains. “But we needed to understand European drivers, so we brought the car to Germany, Italy, France, and the UK.”

“The key thing about Europeans is that you drive fast…everywhere! This is not like Japan, where we are not so aggressive. A Japanese driver slows down on a poor road surface, so the car is not deflected [his hand performs the international mime signal for a car being bounced off a road]. The European driver…doesn’t, really.”

I’m mildly embarrassed on behalf of Western Europe that a man who drives competitively for a hobby reckons commuters over in Europe are bit fighty behind the wheel.

“In Japan, we put mirrors on narrow and twisty roads so we can see around a corner. You don’t in Europe, but that doesn’t stop you guys driving fast into a blind corner,” he continues. He sees the crossover as the answer to these problems because you’re naturally sat higher, and can throw some more suspension travel at the car. He’s adamant this shouldn’t sacrifice ‘precise handling’.

In total, Toyota’s spent two years honing the C-HR on European roads, following three years of R&D back in Japan planning the car. It’s also done at least 150 laps of the Nürburgring (not counting the racing version, which uses mega aero and racing dampers and has a 180bhp 1.6-litre engine). And the testing opens doors for Toyota that Japanese officials would slam on their fingers.

“In Japan, we can’t develop the car on the road using a prototype”, Koba-san explains. “We have to use a test-track, so our impressions are limited”. He points to a chart showing the C-HR’s gestation. Two years into the project, the engineers redesigned the body to introduce greater structural stiffness, purely off the back of what they’d learned at the ‘Ring.  See, those test drivers do actually work on more than just their personal best lap time…

Enough chit-chat. Koba-san wants to go for a drive, and I want to see if he’s been brainwashed by the marketing zombies into thinking a taller, heavier hatchback based on a hybrid taxi can actually be half-decent to drive.

Koba-san’s driving, I’m in the passenger seat, and we’re in the exquisitely picturesque French village of Ermenonville, about an hour north-east of Paris. He’s here for the roads, not the wine.

There are two CH-R prototypes outside. A hybrid will be in the range, but it’s not here today. Instead, we find 1.2-litre turbocharged all-wheel drive model fitted with a CVT and 17-inch wheels that I’m not particularly interested in, and a front-wheel drive model wearing much sexier 18s that everyone in the real world will actually spec, with a far more appealing six-speed manual gearbox. My driver half-jogs across the gravel and guards it. Good man.

Now, I grant you it’s a bit odd to get all the spiel about how Toyota wants the C-HR to be a great drive, then only get to sample it from the passenger seat, but such is life.

As we head out of the village, I learn that the 1.2-litre turbo motor is neither particularly thrusting or parpy to listen to. It’s a bit flat. The seating position is good, though – reasonably low, and the driving position looks sorted, not all angled and awkward like some tippy-toed superminis.

The CH-R is also rather stiff. Surprisingly stiff. Sure, there are some cobbled streets around, and the more open roads on the edge of town are quite bumpy, but they’re no worse than the patchwork network Brits have to rumble around on.

Koba-san’s gone a bit quiet, so I deploy my trusty Emergency Engineer Conversation Starter. It’s always fun to discover what the resident road testers in big car companies actually drive day-to-day. Even if the answer is usually depressingly corporate.

“Oh, I’ve got a Toyota Supra”, Koba-san retorts. “It’s a facelifted model of the last-generation, so that’s that…1996, I think”.

“Cool! You must’ve modified it..?” I venture.

“No, not much. I’ve only fitted new springs and dampers. It’s naturally aspirated, not a twin-turbo. Good car.” Later, I’ll get to see the iPhone slideshow of the immaculate silver Supra parked on the driveway.

He returns the ‘what do you drive?’ favour, and when I tell him I run Top Gear’s long-term Honda Civic Type-R, Koba appears to forget he works for Toyota momentarily. He wants to know all about the 306bhp banzai attack-hatch. Eventually, he gets back on-brand: “Our car is not as stiff as that!”

I’ve been lucky enough to passenger alongside several racing drivers in this job, and the thing that always amazes and humbles me is not the raw driving ability, but the spare mental capacity. The fact that Daniel Ricciardo or Jann Mardenborough can carry huge speed and make impossibly fast corrections while maintaining a pleasant conversation is absurd.

Koba-san isn’t like that. Partly that’s the language barrier, though in fairness his English is a damn site better than my Japanese. Mostly it’s because this car isn’t finished yet. He’s studying every element of its behavior, making a hundred mental notes which he’ll scrawl down in his notebook shortly. I imagine his mind’s eye looks like those green numbers scrolling down in The Matrix.

Normally, you have to wring out answers from car folk when it comes to what they consider a rival. ‘We have no rivals’ is a tediously common refrain. Koba-san? Yeah, he’s not in for that sort of nonsense.

“During the development we tried the top-sellers – the Audi Q3 and the Skoda Yeti. But we reached the limits so fast, we actually tested VW Golfs.”

We’re approaching a 90-degree left hander which then snaps back into a hairpin right that’s off camber and uphill. My driver’s not braking. Still not braking. He’s not going to brake, is he?

One small steering input is applied, followed by a momentary, miniscule prod of the brake to shift the car’s mass forward. Somewhere in that split second we went from third to second gear, but I couldn’t tell you when. Or how.  

The CH-R dives through the corners with absolutely no tyre squeal. It’s also remarkably flat. I can see why Koba-san wanted the stiff suspension. But I can’t see many of the trendy millenials Toyota wants to buy this car driving it with the sheer skill this one’s had applied to it.

Still, it’s the old submariner’s watch argument, I suppose. Nice to know it’ll probably be okay if you ever misjudge a slip road, or overcook a roundabout. Toyota badly needs an image boost alongside the GT86, after all.

If nothing else, at least Koba-san’s got himself a promising piece of kit for dodging the thunder and lightning of the Nürburgring…