Toyota Supra A60

The A60 was styled in Japan, which matters because the car before it was not. The A40 Celica was Calty's work in California and it looked American. This one is straight lines, hard folds and a dead-level belt line, and the Supra version keeps every panel behind the front doors while replacing everything ahead of them. The nose is the difference. It is longer, because a straight six needed the room, and it carries proper pop-up headlamps rather than the Celica's semi-retractable rise-up units. The P-type adds fibreglass flares over its wider tyres. A drag coefficient of 0.35 was worth advertising in 1981. Inside, Toyota went further than it usually did. There was an optional LCD instrument cluster, a trip computer that would tell you how far was left, and in Japan a device called Navicom: a microcomputer-driven compass showing direction and distance to a destination you keyed in yourself. Toyota called it a world first. Honda's Electro Gyrocator arrived the same year and generally gets that credit instead, but the ambition tells you what the Supra was for inside Toyota.

The A60 was never built to race, and the record reads like it. It did race, though, and one of the results is a genuine championship. In 1985 Per Eklund took the Group A title in the British Open Rally Championship driving a Toyota Corolla AE86 and a Celica Supra, which is on Toyota GB's own record of the period. Eklund had already run a Celica Supra to a Group A class win on the 1983 Ulster Rally in a privately prepared car. Circuit racing went less well. Win Percy entered six rounds of the 1983 British Saloon Car Championship in a Toyota Supra Turbo and won one of them. Percy had taken the championship outright three years running before that in other machinery, so the Supra was not the making of him: a heavy Group A coupe against Rovers and Capris was always going to be hard work. In America, Toyota's serious IMSA money went to Dan Gurney's All American Racers, and it went there with Celicas rather than Supras. Toyota's rally programme of these years belonged to the Celica Twin-Cam Turbo, a different car entirely.

The A60 did its cultural work in magazines rather than on screen. Between 1982 and 1984 it took Motor Trend's Import Car of the Year, appeared on the covers of the four big American monthlies in one season, and made the first two Car and Driver 10Best lists. Buyers who had never taken a Japanese car seriously as a driver's car took this one seriously, and that is why a standalone Supra could exist four years later. In Japan the Celica XX had a different job. It was the sporting half of a pair with the Soarer, which took the luxury brief on the same six-cylinder hardware, and it sold on gadgets as much as on speed. Navicom and the LCD dash were the talking points. Since then it has lived in games rather than films. The Celica XX 2800GT is a Gran Turismo regular, which is where most people under forty have met it. Everything the Supra name carries in popular culture, the orange car and the drag strip and the film franchise, belongs to the two generations that came after this one.

The mechanical side of an A60 asks very little of an owner. The 5M-GE is an iron-block twin cam with hydraulic lifters and a reputation for indifference to mileage, the W58 gearbox was built for more torque than it ever sees, and the axle and brakes are ordinary Toyota parts of the period. The one recurring engine complaint on early cars is the oil pressure regulator, a known weak point with an inexpensive fix. Rust is what actually decides whether a car is worth buying. It starts around the hatch aperture and its seals, moves into the rear arches and the sills, and finishes at the strut towers, which is where the sums stop working. Cars from the American southwest and cars imported from Japan are usually structurally better than anything that saw road salt. The harder problem is trim. Toyota stopped supporting this car a long time ago, so interior plastics, lamp lenses, badges and the small brightwork are breaker-yard items. Japanese imports arrive with hazed headlamp lenses and good ones are scarce. None of it is difficult work. It is slow, which is exactly why original cars carry the premium they do.