Toyota Celica A60

This is Toyota at its most geometric. The A60 is assembled from flat panels and hard folds, with a nose that drops away in a straight line and a belt line that runs dead level from the headlamps to the tail lamps. Calty handled the styling, as it had on the car before, but the result is the opposite of the soft American shape it replaced. The launch cars carry the detail worth knowing. Toyota called the headlamps rise-up units: semi-retractable, sitting flush with the bonnet surface when they are down so the nose keeps its line, which was as much about drag as about theatre. In August 1983 they gave way to conventional fully retractable lamps set into a front panel finished in black along with the grille and the side markers. Japanese enthusiasts have called the facelift the Black Mask ever since, and the two noses give one car two quite different faces. Fender mirrors went at the same facelift, replaced by door mirrors, which dates a Japanese-market car across a car park. The liftback is the shape the generation is remembered by, but the notchback coupe is the cleaner piece of drawing and always was.

This is the Celica that finally won something. Toyota Team Europe built a Group 4 car around the naturally aspirated 2000 GT, the RA63, and it won first time out: the 1982 Motogard Rally of New Zealand, Bjorn Waldegard first and Per Eklund second, a works one-two on debut. Then came Group B. The rules asked for 200 road cars, so Toyota built 200 GT-TS Celicas plus twenty evolution rally versions, and TTE developed a 2,090cc version of the 4T-GTE twin-cam turbo making around 370 horsepower at 8,000rpm through a KKK blower. Rear-wheel drive, in a class the Audi Quattro had already made four-wheel drive. On tarmac and forest gravel that was fatal. On the roughest events in the world it was an advantage, because the car was simple, strong and repairable a long way from anywhere. So the Celica Twin-Cam Turbo went to Africa and stayed. Waldegard won the Rallye Cote d'Ivoire in October 1983, then the Safari in 1984. Juha Kankkunen took both in 1985, Waldegard both again in 1986. Six world championship wins, every one of them African, which is where the King of Africa nickname comes from. Group B was abolished at the end of that season, and Toyota's next rally Celica drove all four wheels.

The A60's cultural life is a rally car's. The Twin-Cam Turbo in its white works colours, mud to the window line, sideways on a Kenyan road, is one of the defining images of Group B, and it is the reason most people under fifty recognise this shape at all. Scale-model makers keep it going: the 1984 and 1985 Safari winners are still catalogue items in 1/24, which is not something you can say about many rear-drive Toyotas. The road car had a quieter time of it. It sold in ordinary numbers, was used as ordinary transport, and turns up in period American film and television as set dressing rather than as anything anyone quotes. Toyota itself has been the most consistent keeper of the flame, running the TA64 at Goodwood and holding it in the heritage fleet. In Japan the generation kept a name rather than a role. Ask an owner about a Black Mask and they will know exactly which Celica you mean, and roughly what you think of it.

Two very different cars share one bodyshell here. The running gear is Toyota at its most indestructible: the 22R family went into pickups by the million, the gearboxes and axles are over-engineered for the power on offer, and people genuinely did put enormous mileages on these without doing much beyond oil and filters. The bodyshell is why so few are left. Water gets into the base of the windscreen frame and works outwards, front wings rot where they meet the doors, sills go behind the rear wheels, and the rear arches and boot floor follow. Strut towers are the one that turns a project into a parts car. Cars that spent winters in salt are usually worse than they look in photographs. The one mechanical item to take seriously is the timing chain on 1983-onwards 22R and 22R-E engines. The plastic guides embrittle and break up, the chain then wears through the aluminium timing cover, and coolant ends up in the sump. It is a known job with a known fix and the noise gives you fair warning, but it is not something to put off. After that it is trim. Interior plastics, lenses, badges and the Celica-specific brightwork are what stall a restoration, not anything under the bonnet.