The 17-year itch, about to be scratched
If anyone ‘gets’ the Supra, it’s Ben Barry. Now he’s got one, will he ever want to give it back?
Toyota Supra GR Month 1
The story so far
First new Supra since 2002. Ben liked it more than most at launch – will he still feel that way after a long-term loan?
+ It’s a rear-wheel-drive sports car with a straight six
Two seats; small boot; no manual gearbox option
Logbook
Price £54,340 (£55,050 as tested) Performance 2998cc turbo straight-six, 335bhp, 4.3sec 0-62mph, 155mph
E ciency 34.4mpg (o cial), 33.5mpg (tested), 188g/km CO2 Energy cost 15.5p per mile Miles this month 352 Total miles 836
There’s so much irresponsibility to mentally sift through but ultimately there are two images that leap out when I think Toyota Supra, both Mk4-related. The first is Kazuhiko ‘Smokey’ Nagata, owner of Top Secret, a Japanese tuning house. Smokey brought his 1000bhp Supra to the UK in the late 1990s, hit 197mph on a straight stretch of the A1 (M) in the dead of night, before attending a Cambridgeshire police station and being sent back home.
The second was a pre-YouTube video of a lemon yellow Supra from Japanese tuners Jun, drifting a fast, dry corner on a circuit. It came into shot towing a cloud of tyre smoke and exited with a trebly wail that swirled howling turbo and screeching tyres into one nails-on-blackboard cacophony. I never knew cars could do this on a sealed surface.
The Mk4 ended production in 2002 but still has a strong following (sought-after UK-spec cars are advertised for £40k-£50k), and a fanbase that kept the faith for 17 whole years before the Mk5 arrived. So when a long-term loan became a possibility, that long wait and all that residual fondness meant I put my hand up for the keys like an over-eager pupil desperate to answer a question. I now have six months to resist driving like a lunatic in an Initial D comic.
While key tenets of the Supra philosophy remain the same, namely a turbocharged straight-six engine and rear-drive layout, more is different about this all-new generation – especially as the Mk5 is based on the BMW Z4 platform, and built at the same Magna Steyr production facility in Austria.
So not only are the powertrain, suspension hardware and electronic systems carried over from the BMW, but so too is the infotainment and switchgear – you select Drive (this time the Supra is automatic only) on a BMW shifter, and twirl an iDrive rotary controller to select your radio ⊲