Cupra Ateca
And although the two cars will both be built on the same line, not by BMW nor Toyota, but by Steyr in Austria, they didn’t end up as a cut ’n’ paste pair of clones like the Toyota GT86 and Subaru BRZ. BMW has a roadster, Toyota a coupe, and they look entirely different.
How different the Toyota and BMW will feel to the driver is harder to know, at least for the moment. The Z4 is a good car anyway. It has a lot of extra strength in its chassis mounts for excellent grip and precision, versus the normal RWD BMW saloons. From the way Tada talks, he is tuning his car to be a little more edgy. The extremely strong body – more rigid than the Lexus LFA supercar was – will let him do what he chooses.
Some tuning choices are left to the driver, as is the modern way. A sport button affects throttle mapping and engine sound, shift pattern, steering weight, the electronic control of the active diff, and the adaptive damper strategy. The ESP has a middle ‘Track’ setting.
The word ‘track’ crops up a lot in Toyota’s talk. GR stands for Gazoo Racing, the competition division that has lately won Le Mans and World Rallies, and is now doing versions of road cars too. The Supra will race. They’ve had long enough to talk about that.
It’s five years since the FT-1 concept, which was designed in the California studio. “We did our best to realise its spirit,” says Nakamura, although that was a much bigger car, for showstand effect. Then we had the crazy Toyota GR Supra Racing Concept in March 2018. We saw the BMW Z4 in summer 2018 and drove it in October. We drove the Supra prototype, in an eye-scrambling patchwork wrap. Then saw photos of the version that’ll race in Japanese super GT (see panel, right). Then blurry internet leaks of the Supra proper. The wait has been agonising. Still, better late than never, and better late and great than timely and mediocre.
It took a long time for Toyota and BMW to decide how to play this one. We’ve known since 2012 that Toyota was working on several things with BMW, among them batteries and fuel cells and lightweight structures and, hey, a sports car.
Up to the end of 2014, the two sides of the sports-car project were, I was told at the time by a BMW board member, “still staring at each other across a table” rather than actually developing a car. They each wanted something different, a roadster for BMW and a hard-top for Toyota. Once they’d agreed hard points, the Toyota and BMW design teams separated and instituted a no-peeking rule on each other’s efforts.
Actually, for a long time they weren’t sure they could afford to build the things at all. That’s because sales numbers for twoseaters, are, as with every righteous and desirable kind of car, wilting in the face of the omni-SUV assault.
Whatever you may think of the new Supra’s under-skin relationship with the Z4, fact is, it simply wouldn’t otherwise exist. Nor the Z4, in all probability. They look different on top, they appeal to different heritages, and they might well end up driving differently too.
“FROM THE WAY TADA TALKS, HE IS TUNING THE SUPRA TO BE A LITTLE MORE EDGY”