TOYOTA SUPRA
WE’VE RECENTLY BEEN BEHIND THE WHEEL OF ONE OF THE MOST HYPED CARS OF RECENT YEARS, THE 2019 TOYOTA GR SUPRA
TOYOTA REINVENTS ITS CLASSIC
The worldwide car community has been lucky in recent years, as automaker have heeded calls to break open the design vault and get back to work on numerous cult-classic bloodlines. Some have even gone so far as to revive their biggest nameplates. While there’s been plenty of excitement surrounding each launch, few have enjoyed the amount of media space afforded the latest offering from Toyota: the 2019
Toyota GR Supra (A90). From the moment the decision makers at Japan’s biggest automotive manufacturer let slip that they were putting the long-awaited successor to the famed Supra Mk4 into production, the motoring world starting acting like giddy kids catching wind of what they were getting for their birthdays. The Supra fraternity nearly broke the internet speculating, and news sites were swarming with updates as more snippets of information were let loose.
Mega Supra hype This new Supra was put on a pedestal and expectations were high. Fans recalled the predecessor through rose-tinted glasses: a hulking 2Jz-powered monster that had impressive performance figures straight out of the showroom. The Mk5 is different. It is more of a heavy grand tourer, albeit with a ton of unlockable potential. So, to see if this next-generation would live up to all the hype and expectations, we wangled one for the day and subjected it a pretty thorough test.
My first memory of the car is a simple one: as I pulled out of Toyota New Zealand’s Auckland office driveway, the screech of wiper blades on a dry windscreen quickly taught me that the indicators weren’t on the right-hand side of the steering column. It was the first of many subtle reminders that, despite its Toyota badge, it is really a BMW in disguise.
Yep, in case you haven’t heard yet, the Mk5 was built in partnership with German automaker BMW, using the ‘cluster architecture’ (CLAR) platform developed by BMW. It’s closely related to the Z4 M40i, and shares the same straight-six turbocharged heart and eight-speed ZF automatic transmission.
Toyota claims that the Mk5 makes 250kw at 5000–6500rpm and 500Nm, which is cranked out at an impressively low 1600rpm. These figures are identical to those of the Z4 — most likely the result of an internal agreement for one not to outdo the other on paper.
Toyota DNA shines through
Climbing inside the tight cabin and eagerly pushing the start button, flicking the Bmw-esque gear stick down into drive, it’s still easy to see that Toyota has put its fingerprints all over the engine. It never stops breathing. Response from the fly-by-wire throttle feels instantaneous, and a simple depression of the right foot will get on boost quickly — and more than enough to throw you back in your seat. Factor in that the ZF is the quickest-shifting traditional automatic in the game, and, at a scarily fast rate, you’re reaching speeds that would have your licence permanently cancelled. The official 0–100kph figure is set at 4.1 seconds — a claim that my ‘seat of the pants’ dyno would not dispute.
My one criticism in this department was that the extra punch of driver engagement that can only be found through a manual gear change was noticeably absent. The manual mode with paddle shift on the ZF is rapid, and easily outshifts anyone on an H-pattern, but it doesn’t compare with feeling the car pull deep into the rev range before enthusiastically slapping it into the next gear. Perhaps it wasn’t viable for Toyota to produce and fit its own manual box to the CLAR platform.
On paper, the Mk5 is clearly designed for ‘enthusiastic’ driving, and this can be felt in the way it handles