With a limited-run Final Edition special, the Toyota GR Supra is about to depart this earthly realm, nearly six years after it was launched early in 2019 at the Detroit motor show.
It doesn’t seem like six years to me, even though Toyota had been talking about building a new Supra since 2012, we saw prototypes in 2018 and in September 2019 I drove a still-disguised pre-production ‘A90’.
Perhaps it’s my age, but it still seems like the Supra hasn’t long arrived, and yet with a 429bhp special, away it goes.
Not that it was that easy to buy one in the UK later in its life anyway. This market was granted a small annual allocation of cars and the Supra was in and out of Toyota’s price lists as a result.
The Final Edition is limited to 300 examples globally, and it’s not year clear how many the UK will get.
But it brings with it a serious number of changes: extra power, adjustable KW dampers from a GT4 track variant, new drilled brake discs, an Akrapovic exhaust, baffles in the sump to prevent oil starvation, extra body bracing, exterior aerodynamic addenda and some incredibly uncomfortable-looking seats. Sounds like a proper circuit weapon.
But even though it seems (to me) like the Supra has been around for no time at all, my attitude towards it has shifted markedly – totally unlike, say, how I feel about the Alpine A110, which hasn’t had too dissimilar a lifespan.
I loved the A110 at launch and still love it the same way now. (Incidentally, while the A110 is still around, its non-compliance with the EU’s General Safety Regulations 2 means Alpine can sell no more than 1500 across Europe per year. Why hasn’t the UK exempted itself from this? Why aren’t we marching on parliament to demand more A110s?)
Meanwhile, the Supra is a car that I think I like more now than when in 2019 our road test found “it left us wanting more”.
It was something of a ‘not quite’ car: not quite an A110, not quite a Porsche 718 Cayman. Good but perhaps the least satisfying of the group of cars that all decided they might be able to take on the Porsche all at the same time.
Today I’m more sold on the general attitude of the Supra than ever. I don’t want ‘more’ than the ordinary one, with a six-cylinder engine, an automatic gearbox and whatever else it came with at the time.