Toyota Celica T200

Takashi Okuda's shape is the most divisive thing Toyota did with the Celica, and it has aged better than the reaction it got. Every edge from the T180 is gone. The nose is a single curved surface with four separate round headlamps let into it, the wheel arches swell out of the body rather than being pressed into it, and the liftback's tail is one continuous radius from roof to bumper. In Japan the four-lamp face became the generation's whole identity, and the family resemblance to the A80 Supra launched a year earlier was obvious enough that people still call it the small Supra. The 1,750mm width is a design decision with a tax consequence: it moved the Celica into Japan's 3-number class and Toyota did it anyway. Toyota also sold a rebodied version through a different dealer chain as the Curren, with conventional rectangular headlights, which is a useful demonstration of how much of this car's character was in the lamps. Convertibles were built nearly complete in Japan, then shipped to ASC in Rancho Dominguez, California, where the roof came off and a three-layer power top went on.

Everything the T200 is remembered for happened in one season. The ST205 GT-Four, homologated in February 1994, went to work for Toyota Team Europe in 1995 with Juha Kankkunen, Didier Auriol and Armin Schwarz. It won once, on the Tour de Corse from 3 to 5 May, Auriol beating Francois Delecour's Escort by fifteen seconds. Then came Rally Catalunya on 23 October. Scrutineers took the turbo restrictor apart and it failed on three counts: it was not sealed, so it could be moved without disturbing the seals; air could reach the engine without passing through it; and it could sit further from the turbine than the 50mm the rules allowed. Release the clamp and a spring flicked the assembly back into a legal-looking position. The FIA put the gain at roughly 25 percent more air than permitted. At an extraordinary World Motor Sport Council on 3 November the team was excluded from the 1995 championship, every driver point was taken back, and it was banned for twelve months. Max Mosley called it the most sophisticated device he had seen in 30 years of motorsport, and said nothing suggested the drivers knew. Toyota returned in 1997 with a Corolla.

In January 1995, three months before Auriol won in Corsica and nine months before the FIA took the restrictor apart, Sega put the Celica GT-Four ST205 in an arcade cabinet. Sega Rally Championship gave players two licensed cars, the ST205 and the Lancia Delta HF Integrale, with a Stratos hidden behind them, and it did more for this car's standing with people who were eleven years old in 1995 than any rally result ever did. The Castrol livery, white with green and red, is the image most people carry of the T200 and most of them have never seen the road car it came from. The scandal has had a stranger afterlife. Rather than reading as cheating, the restrictor has become an engineering party piece, retold with obvious admiration for a device the sport's own president described in the language of a compliment. Toyota's own history pages are quieter about it: the corporate WRC timeline moves from 1994 to 1997 without much of a pause. The road cars themselves left almost no cultural trace, which is a fair reflection of what they were sold as.

Mechanically these are Toyotas from the period when that meant something specific, and the ordinary ones simply keep going. The 7A-FE, 5S-FE and 3S-FE will do enormous mileages on nothing more than oil and a timing belt at the interval, and the 3S-GE is barely less durable as long as it is not being asked to make more than it was built for. What actually kills T200s is the bodyshell. Water gets under the sound deadener and into the floor, sits in the sills and the rear arches, and works on the strut towers, and none of it announces itself until it is structural. Hatch and boot seals harden and leak. Door glass rattles as the regulators and rubbers age. The Super Strut front end is a maintenance item rather than a fault, but it is an expensive one, and a neglected set is the single most common reason a good-looking car drives badly. On the GT-Four, add the cost of keeping the cooling system honest and the fact that a large share of surviving cars have been modified by somebody. Sorted, they are undemanding cars to live with.