Last Monday at the Detroit Auto Show, Toyota made the official announcement that the Two-seat Supra will make its return. Developed in cooperation with Germany’s BMW, CEO Akio Toyoda himself tested it on different racetracks, including the very challenging Nurburgring in Germany. The resurrection of the Supra was covered in depth by CNN Business this past week, and they took close note of the fact that it’s fantastic that the car exists at all. The Supra name had its birth as the high-performance version of the Celica in the late 1970s.
Later becoming a separate model under its own name, it was a choice that was well-known for offering the ultimate in high-level performance. The fourth generation of the Supra which was sold in the 1990s is what is now considered the most desirable, with websites like BringaTrailer.com offering them for six figures. All of us at Rick McGill were smitten by the Supra’s ability to be modified, and experienced tuners could make the 6-cylinder engine’s output simply astronomical. This was the car that also had a starring role in the “Fast and Furious” movies, giving it a high level of credibility in the arena of street racers and fans of cars with atrocious levels of power.
One other element of inspiration for the new Supra model is the Toyota 2000GT of the late 1960s, which was our first attempt at a truly world-class and track-ready model. If you are lucky enough to locate a 2000GT, you will have to pony up over a million dollars, quite a hefty sum. The BMW Z4 is what the Supra shares most of its engineering with, and the 335-horsepower turbocharged 6-cylinder engine was developed by the German masters of speed and agility as well. Some will likely be disappointed that there is no option for a manual transmission, but a top speed of 155 miles an hour and a zero to 60 time in just over 4 seconds will probably quell the purists who understandably would get excited for the existence of a stick!
The new Supra will have nearly 50:50 front-to-rear weight balance for better cornering, and aerodynamic features on the front and rear of the car are also designed to provide a balance in downward pressure when you really start to pick up the speed drastically, a fairly common occurrence in a car like this! This month in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona, the first completed model was sold for charity, and just one look at this thing is enough to raise your heart-rate. The image shown here presents the car in a smoldering hot red color, and it appears to be everything we could have ever wished for in a re-incarnation this groundbreaking. At the time it came out, this car was deemed by Top Gear as “more accelerative than the mid-engined V8 Ferrari,” and this is one car that we fully believe will survive the SUV-popularity explosion!
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