Toyota Celica A40/A50

This is the car Calty was built to produce. Toyota opened the studio in El Segundo in 1973, the first design centre a Japanese manufacturer had established in North America, and the second-generation Celica was the first thing it put into production. David Stollery ran the project. He had spent seven years designing at General Motors before Toyota hired him to set the studio up, and it shows in the proportions: long bonnet, cabin set well back, a tail that lifts rather than falls away. The details are where it earns its place. Both bodies use frameless door glass against a deliberately thick B pillar, so the side view reads as a hardtop with the rollover structure hidden inside it. The glass itself is claimed as a first for a Japanese production car, curved in all three dimensions rather than rolled in two. August 1979 is the visible dividing line. Everything before it wears four round headlamps, carried over in spirit from the first Celica; everything after wears four rectangular ones with revised tail lamps behind. Which you prefer is genuinely argued about among owners, and the round-lamp cars are the ones that still look like 1977 rather than 1981.

The A40 is the Celica that went rallying and did not win. Toyota Team Europe, the Cologne operation that had grown out of Ove Andersson's own team, built a Group 4 car from it, and Toyota's own WRC history dates that car's debut to the 1980 Rally of Portugal. The FIA still holds homologation papers for the Celica 2000 GT in RA40 and RA45 form. It arrived at the wrong moment. A naturally aspirated two-litre with a live rear axle was being asked to race the first generation of turbocharged and four-wheel-drive rally cars, and the results read accordingly: sixth on the 1980 Acropolis for Andersson and Liddon, seventh on that year's 1000 Lakes, and a genuinely quick run on the 1980 RAC where Bjorn Waldegard led before retiring. No World Championship win, at any event, in any year. Two things get filed here that do not belong. The 560 horsepower Group 5 Celica LB Turbo that Schnitzer ran in the German championship used the first-generation bodyshell, not this one. And the Safari wins and the Group B headlines belong to the TA64 Celica Twin-Cam Turbo, a car three years newer than the last A50.

There is no film to point at, and pretending otherwise would misdescribe the car. A 1979 GT Liftback turns up in a 1980 Colombian action picture, and later A40s appear as period furniture in television drama, which is what happens to a car that sold in ordinary numbers and was then thrown away. Its cultural work is industrial, and it is larger than it looks. Two nameplates that dominate Toyota's next forty years arrive on derivatives of this exact car. The Celica XX went into production in April 1978 and reached America as the Celica Supra for 1979 with a 2.6-litre six, which is where the Supra begins. The Celica Camry, a four-door launched in Japan in January 1980, is where the Camry name starts, on a car wearing Celica front-end language over Carina engineering. The third piece is the reception. American writers called it the Japanese Mustang, and by 1978 that had stopped being an accusation of imitation. It was a description of the segment Toyota now competed in, with a car drawn a few miles from the beach.

Two separate cars live inside one ownership experience here. The mechanical car is close to indestructible. The 20R and 22R are among the toughest four-cylinder engines Toyota ever built, they run a dual timing chain on steel guides rather than the plastic-guided single chain that came later, and the gearboxes, axles and running gear all outlast the bodyshell by a wide margin. People genuinely did run these to enormous mileages without doing much to them. The bodyshell is the other car, and it is why so few are left. Water sits in the scuttle and works outward into the windscreen aperture, doors rot from inside the shell rather than through the skin, and sills, floors and rear quarters follow. On a liftback the hatch aperture joins in. After rust comes trim. Badges, lenses, interior plastics, the dash and the Celica-specific brightwork were made for a car nobody expected to keep, and they are what stall restorations, not anything mechanical. Sunchasers add a list of their own: the fibreglass surround, the folding rear section and its frame, and water finding its way past a forty-five-year-old seal into a floor that was never designed to be open to the sky.