The wait is over, and a motoring icon has officially returned. Yep, after what feels like an eternity of camouflaged cars, teaser campaigns and even the launch of the car’s badge - and just the badge - at the LA motor show, Toyota has at last torn the covers of its all-new Supra in Detroit.
The all-new Supra, developed in partnership with BMW’s Z4, will launch in Australia later this year, and we now finally know what it looks like, and how much power it produces.
The first of many models developed under Toyota’s newly formed Gazoo Racing Company performance division, the new Supra benefits from a BMW-borrowed turbocharged 3.0-litre engine, which will produce 250kW and 500Nm. It’s paired with a super-slick eight-speed automatic that will shuffle that power straight to the rear wheels.
And the results are impressive; 100km/h will whip past the windows in 4.3 seconds - complements of standard launch control - with drivers also able to flick between Normal and Sport mode, with a bonus Track setting reducing the amount of stability-control intervention, which hopefully means you’ll be able to elicit some tail wagging.
The Supra will also be offered with a four-cylinder, 2.0-litre engine in two differed tunes; one good for 190kW and the other delivering 145kW. We have so far only driven the six-cylinder car, and on specs alone we feel comfortable saying that's the one you really want.
Full specifications are still being revealed, but we have been told to expect keyless entry, push-button start, powered windows, leather seats and a (BMW-sourced) multimedia system, and Toyota is pushing to have Apple CarPlay included by the time the car launches in Australia toward the back end of 2019.
Camouflage off, you can finally see the squatting-on-its-haunches styling of the Supra, with muscular bulges above the rear tyres, a razor-thin boot spoiler, plenty of gouges and venting throughout the body and that bubble-domed roof. The clearly BMW-flavoured interior is mercifully clean and unfussy.
Toyota says that all Australian-delivered cars (and there will only be 300 of them in the Supra’s first 12 months) will be fitted with an active differential, which uses its own ECU to monitor the conditions and driver input for maximum grip. At the front you’ll also find MacPherson struts, and a five-link suspension set-up at the rear.
Toyota says it Supra provides more structural rigidity than its Lexus LFA supercar, and a lower centre of gravity than the Toyota 86. Add to that a claimed 50:50 weight distribution, the brand’s new sports coupe appears to be ticking plenty of boxes. With a wheelbase that is 100mm shorter than that of the 86, Toyota says the Supra delivers a wheelbase-to-tread ratio of 1.55 - a figure it claims is among the smallest of any performance car.
The Supra was jointly developed with the BMW Z4, of course, and so Toyota’s engineers, including Tetsuya Tada, say they spent plenty of time pounding out laps of the Nürburgring to perfect the dynamics.
"We set out to create a pure sports car that would attain the ultimate in the fun of driving. Rather than only working toward specs such as horsepower and circuit lap times, we emphasized sensitivity performance, such as the degree to which driving could be felt to be fun, with car and driver becoming one," Tada said, sounding a little like he'd been reading from a Mazda brochure.
The final test, though, was for company president Akio Toyoda to lap the Nürburgring in the new Supra before giving it his personal “green light”.
"Even though Toyota had no plans to make a new Supra, just like a lot of other diehard Supra fans around the world, I secretly wanted to make it happen," Toyoda said.
"The new GR Supra was born through testing at Nürburgring, and I can honestly say that it is a car that is fun to drive and better than ever.”
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