It's a Toyota thing; the world's biggest automaker seems to have a talent for tortured names and this one - which will be seen in public for the first time this weekend at the Nurburgring 24-Hour endurance race, is a winner.
The GRMN Sports Hybrid Concept II is a whole lot prettier than its name would suggest (although it doesn't look like any Toyota we've ever seen - if anything, it looks English!) and, if it lives up to its specification, it should be a lot of fun to drive.
GRMN stands for “Gazoo Racing tuned by the Master of Nurburgring”; Gazoo Racing is Toyota's in-house tuning arm and the "Master of Nurburgring" refers to the late Hiromu Naruse, former Toyota chief test driver and head of Gazoo, who was killed in an accident last year while testing a prototype Lexus LFA Nurburgring Edition in Germany.
In technical terms, it's the successor to the MR2 petrol-electric sports concept shown at Tokyo motor show, with a mid-mounted, 183kW, 3.5-litre V6 petrol engine in unit with dual electric motors driving the rear wheels - and another, 37kW electric motor driving the front wheels.
That gives it a total of 220kW driving a perfectly-balanced car that weighs "1500kg or less", running on 19" rims shod with 225/40 rubber in front and 255/35 at the rear - a recipe for sparkling if not earth-shattering performance, although Toyota carefully avoids mentioning any numbers.
Toyota introduced the first mass-produced petrol-electric hybrid, the Prius, in 1997, and the GRMN is part of its ongoing research into applying hybrid technology to racing and sports cars.