With Christmas now just a week away, it’s time to wrap up (pun intended) the inaugural Motornerd Awards and see off the year in style. So, what better way to set up the finale by celebrating the greatest constructed machine of 2025?

The next Motornerd Award is the Car of The Year, one which celebrates not just speed but mechanical superiority, and crowns the car that proved itself against its competition. And though technically it’s one of the harder awards to judge given that we’re dealing with Rallying, Endurance, Touring and Formulae machines all designed for different disciplines here, in the end it went down to one car that’s truly elevated itself into a modern icon.

The 2025 Motornerd Car of The Year is the Toyota GR Yaris Rally1, for its utterly dominant displays in the WRC. I mean, when you look at the stats it’s hardly a contest: No other manufacturer has constructed something so utterly superior to its competition.

Securing both the manufacturer’s and driver’s titles for Toyota and a 42-year old Sebastian Ogier, the Yaris GR Rally1 has put both Hyundai and Ford to the sword in 12 of the 14 rounds of an expanded WRC calendar across all surface types.

Only surrendering top spot twice to the aforementioned Oliver Solberg and 2024’s driver’s champion Thierry Neuville, it’s been the standout of its discipline all year, even managing a 1-2-3 podium lockout in Spain – the only seen in the WRC all year. 1-2-3 also happened to be the final placings of the car’s 3 full season drivers.

Ogier topped the standings despite optionally missing 3 rounds, followed up by Elfyn Evans and double world champion Kalle Rovenpera, who’s moving to Super Formula next year with Toyota’s support. Of the others competing, Takamoto Katsuta finished fifth, with Rally1 rookie Sami Pajari eighth – yet still ahead of both Fords.

The GR Yaris Rally1 has truly had its best year in 2025 too, bringing in a monstrous points tally of 735 – nearly 200 more than its previous best in 2024 and has also won a record number of rallies this year – 12 to 2024’s 8 victories.

And yes, critics will point to a perhaps weakening WRC entry list. It’s no secret that Ford have been largely uncompetitive of late, while Hyundai are winding down their own Rally1 programme as the brand pivots to WEC with its subsidiary Genesis from next year. You might say the WRC is experiencing what WEC went through after Porsche pulled out of LMP1 in 2017 but in reality it’s not quite so stark. Hyundai have proven they can still be just as good as their Japanese rivals, and it’s not like the GR Yaris Rally1 has cruised to victory in each round either.

The reality is all of Toyota’s 12 triumphs have all been fought hard and fair, and the marque have built a machine that comes out on top nearly every time without fail. If you ask me, that deserves some real recognition.

And that’s why Toyota’s GR Yaris Rally1 unequivocally deserves the – I won’t call it coveted – title of Motornerd Car of The Year 2025.

image credit: Antti Leppänen, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons