Toyota Celica T180

Super Round was Toyota's own name for the shape, and the marketing had an engineering argument behind it. The claim was that continuous curvature and the absence of straight edges stiffened the panels, so the body gained rigidity without gaining weight. Whether or not you accept that, it produced one of the softest, most organic shapes of the period, and it dates the car precisely to the turn of the nineties. The pop-up headlamps are the detail that matters most now, because this is the last Celica that had them. The car that replaced it in late 1993 used exposed round lamps that people still argue about. There are two liftbacks and they are different things to look at. The normal body is narrow and smooth; the wide body adds flared arches front and rear and was reserved for the GT-S and the four-wheel-drive cars, which is why a plain 2.2 in the right shell looks like a rally homologation car. The August 1991 facelift is the visible dividing line. Toyota's three-ellipse emblem arrived on the bonnet and boot, the tail lamps were redrawn with a smoked red frame, and the front-drive cars took a new bumper.

Carlos Sainz had already given Toyota a drivers' title in 1990, in the outgoing ST165. What the company still did not have was the manufacturers' championship, and this is the generation that delivered it. Group A demanded 5,000 road cars, so Toyota built them. The GT-Four RC launched in Japan in September 1991 and reached Europe and Singapore as the Carlos Sainz Limited Edition and Australia as the Group A Rallye, carrying a water-to-air intercooler that Toyota Team Europe had asked for because it was easier to tune. The FIA homologated the car for Group A from the start of 1992. TTE ran it from that year's Monte Carlo Rally and won with it first on the Safari in April. Sainz took four wins and a second drivers' title, sealed on the RAC, while Lancia held on to the makers' championship. 1993 settled that argument. Toyota won six rounds, Kankkunen took five of them and a fourth drivers' crown, and the manufacturers' title fell at Rally Australia. No maker from outside Europe had won it since the series began in 1973. Didier Auriol and a second manufacturers' title followed in 1994.

Toyota did something in 1991 that almost nobody else was doing. It put a driver's name on a road car. The Carlos Sainz Limited Edition was the European version of the homologation model, sold in showrooms alongside ordinary Celicas, and for a certain kind of European teenager that badge did more for Toyota than any advertisement. The rest of the car's fame arrived through the same door. Tamiya released the Castrol-liveried Toyota Team Europe car as a plastic kit while it was still winning, and it has been a radio-controlled model on and off ever since. The ST185 rally car has been in Gran Turismo since the second game. Almost none of this attaches to the car most people actually bought. That car has a quieter story and it is a market one. America took 78,521 Celicas in 1990 and 29,237 in 1993, which is what the collapse of the affordable sporty coupe looks like written out in four numbers. The T180 was the last Celica sold in genuinely large volume anywhere, and everything after it was a smaller car in a smaller segment.

Two different cars live inside one ownership experience. Mechanically these are among the easiest classics of their decade to run. The 1.6 is a Corolla engine, the 2.2 is a Camry engine without the balance shafts, and both will pass two hundred thousand miles on servicing and little else. The belts are non-interference, so the worst case of a neglected timing belt is a tow truck rather than a rebuild. The body decides whether a car is worth owning. Water sits in the floor pan under the sound deadener and rots it from the inside, which is why the first thing anyone should do to a T180 is lift the carpet. Rockers and the metal behind the rear wheels follow, then the strut tower seams. Then the small things that turn a cheap car into a project. Pop-up headlamp motors wear out and their linkages seize. Water pump seals weep across every year of production. 1992 and 1993 cars get through air conditioning expansion valves. The 3S engines leak oil past the distributor shaft seal into the cap, which presents as an ignition fault and is not one.