Toyota Celica T160

Toyota named the shape before anyone else could. The launch campaign called it ryumenkei, written 流面形 and usually rendered as flowing surface form, and the phrase stuck hard enough that Japanese owners and magazines still use it as this generation's name instead of T160. The claim behind it was aerodynamic. Toyota quoted a drag coefficient of 0.31 for cars fitted with the rear spoiler, and the body works for it: pop-up lamps to keep the nose low, glass mounted flush with the metal around it, fender blisters swelling out of the doors rather than bolted onto them, and a blacked-out rear pillar that makes the greenhouse read as one continuous pane. Three bodies came out of it. The liftback is the shape the car was drawn as. The notchback coupe is rarer and, to some eyes, tidier. The convertible is the odd one. Toyota shipped finished coupes to ASC in Rancho Dominguez, California, where the roof came off and a powered top, chassis reinforcement and new rear quarter windows went in. Japanese-market cars made the trip in both directions before being sold at home.

The front-drive car itself did compete, quietly. A Group A ST162 ran in the All Japan Touring Car Championship in 1987, which is a footnote rather than a record, and it is close to the whole of the front-drive Celica's competition career. The car that mattered was the one Toyota built to get around that problem. The ST165 GT-Four existed because Group A demanded a road car, and because Toyota Team Europe needed four-wheel drive and a turbocharger to be competitive at all. It made its World Rally Championship debut on the 1988 Tour de Corse. Its first win came at Rally Australia in September 1989 with Juha Kankkunen driving. In October 1990, at Rallye Sanremo, Carlos Sainz took the drivers' title in one, the first WRC championship any Toyota driver had won. That record belongs to the GT-Four's own page here, and it should. What belongs to this generation is the decision behind it. Toyota answered the loss of rear-wheel drive by building something no rear-drive Celica could have been, and it worked inside four years.

In Japan this generation has a film attached to it, and not a small one. Watashi wo Ski ni Tsuretette, released in 1987 and usually given in English as Take Me Out to the Snowland, put two ST165 GT-Fours, one white and one red, on snow-covered mountain roads at speed. It landed in the middle of Japan's ski boom and helped inflate it. Traffic on the Kan-Etsu expressway out of Tokyo became a national joke, resort stickers went on rear windows, and taking the four-wheel drive became the sensible thing to say about a weekend in the mountains. The car still carries it. Toyota's own GAZOO site has interviewed owners who went looking for an ST165 decades later specifically because of that film, and there is a national ST16 owners' meeting in Japan built around this generation. Outside Japan the reach is thinner and mostly digital. The ST165 has been in the Gran Turismo games since the second one, which is how a lot of people met the car at all. Beyond that, the badge that travelled was All-Trac rather than Celica.

Two different cars again, and this time the split is body against everything else. The 3S engines are ordinary Toyota, which is to say they run for a very long time on oil changes and indifference. They do have habits. The twin-cam 3S-GE cracks its exhaust manifold between the first two cylinders, coolant seeps from the T-junction pipe where it is awkward to see and worse to reach, and valve cover gaskets harden and weep down the block. The timing belt is rubber and it is a scheduled job, not a lifetime part. Rust is what ends these cars. It starts under the sound deadener on the floor, which means the first sign is usually damp carpet rather than a bubble in the paint, and it works outward into the rockers, the rear quarters and the strut towers. Then there is the 1980s tax. Pop-up headlamp motors and their linkages wear, interior plastics have gone brittle, and trim for a car nobody expected to keep is the thing that turns a running project into a stalled one.