Shed of the Week | Toyota Yaris SR

Before there was a Yaris GR, there was a Yaris SR - and now it's less than £1,500

By Tony Middlehurst / Friday, 5 September 2025 / Loading comments

Just like the original debutantes – posh society lassies who had a reputation for being a bit flighty – SOTW first-timers are coming thick and fast these days. Today we’re in Toyota Yaris country for the first time. Not just any old Yaris, either, but a gen-two SR - ooo!

This is an April 2007 example, which means it will be one of the very first SRs. And one of the very few SRs too, because not many were bought. Why? Well, for a start it would be another 13 years before GR pixie dust would be sprinkled over the Yaris (with the GRMN a little before as a teaser). In 2007, and for a good while after that too, the Yaris was just another faceless runaround.

The SR could have been a contender, but did the reality live up to the exciting letters? It had the look, with 8mm lower suspension and 17-inch alloys. On top of that were stiffer dampers and ARBs, stability and traction control, a bodykit, climate control and LED rear lights. It also had 12 percent quicker electric steering, but let’s not hold that against it: EPS was a big thing at the time. Nobody knew it would take years to make it any good from a driver’s perspective.

So far, so OK-ish, but, as Shed whispered to his mate when Mrs Shed walked into the village pub with her mother, here come the big buts. The SR wasn’t a performance machine. Its 1.8 VVT-i engine put out just 131hp at 6,000rpm and 128lb ft at 4,400rpm. Its 0-60mph time was therefore disappointingly average at 9sec. A few minutes after it reached the 60mph mark the speedo needle would just about creep past 120mph before calling it a day.

The best clue as to the SR’s position in the motoring hinterland lay in its pricing. It was £12,995 for the three-door or £13,495 for the (presumably very rare indeed) 5-door. Those prices made it £2,600 cheaper than the Corsa VXR and three grand less than the RenaultSport Clio 197, neither of which it came anywhere near to rivalling dynamically. It was built to be cheap to run and insure and to toe the Toyota line on durability. Eighteen years on, it seems to have done that. You’ll be squinting hard to pick up many differences between our Shed and how it would have looked in the showroom in 2007. Funny to think how we once lambasted Japanese cars for their tinniness.

In early 2008 Toyota upgraded the SR’s spec in an attempt to shift more units, throwing ‘Motorsport’ alloys, lower lowered suspension, a roof spoiler, various trim tart-ups and some segment-first sat-nav at it. Sadly, no changes were made to the mech spec, and so despite the manful efforts of Toyota’s British PR team who assured us it was a ‘winning recipe’, people still didn’t get the SR message and continued to blank it. By the end of 2008 the model had been quietly dropped from the Toyota GB range after a mayfly lifespan of well under two years.

Looking at it now, the naturally aspirated 1.8 VVT-i engine was clearly in desperate need of unnatural aspiration. Toyota had form in that department. Its Corolla T-Sport Compressor came with a supercharger to take the unassisted Corolla T-Sport’s power up from 189hp to 215hp. For some reason, though, you had to rev the knackers off the Compressor to get it going. Full power didn’t arrive until 8,200rpm, 4,000rpm after the torque had peaked.

The question is, was the Yaris SR’s 131hp 1.8 VVTi the same engine as the earlier non-Compressed Corolla T-Sport’s 189hp 1.8 VVTi, or was it some dastardly milquetoast imitation? Unfortunately Shed’s research budget does not allow him to answer that question. All he knows is that at the launch in 2007 Toyota said that the SR had an ‘all new Dual VVT-i’ engine giving ‘enjoyable driving performance, refinement and fuel economy’. Not sure if the gentle acceleration or 39.2mpg combined fuel consumption figures qualified it for the word enjoyable, and the refinement on the motorway wasn’t as good as it could have been either thanks to it having a five-speed rather than a six-speed gearbox, but YMMV innit.

What’s good? The SR’s VED for UK users should be £305 or thereabouts and our shed is not an expensive car to buy either at £1,395. The next MOT test is due this Sunday. For most other marques that would be a red flag, but as you’d expect from Toyota the test history up to now has been reassuringly boring, with only service and consumable items mentioned so far. The mysterious ‘product’ that traditionally clouds plastic headlamp lenses and that occurs nowhere else in nature was the only advisory on last September’s exam sheet.

This SR might not have the performance, but it looks like it might, and maybe that’s all you need on today’s heavily monitored roads where speed-based fun can and will be punished. And it could have been worse: there was a 1.3 SR with 86hp.

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