Toyota warms up its engines for the presentation of the Supra Concept at the Geneva Motor Show

Toyota wants to relaunch on the market “the most iconic sports car in the history” of the brand. The first steps towards this were taken a few years ago, when the Japanese manufacturer reached an agreement with BMW to establish a strategic alliance in various fields, one of which contemplated “the joint development of a new platform for sports cars with which to meet the needs of both brands to cover different segments of the sports vehicle market, without the resulting models necessarily having to compete directly with each other”.

And so it has been. BMW has opted to produce the new Z4 based on the aforementioned platform, which the Bavarian brand presented at the last Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance at the end of last November. For this reason, Toyota decided to postpone the presentation of its sports model and delayed the presentation of the Supra Concept, initially planned to unveil the model at the Los Angeles Motor Show, until the Geneva Motor Show, which opens its doors in early March next.

Both cars will be produced in Europe, at the plant Magna Steyr has in Austria. Magna is a small but high-quality manufacturer that regularly works for major car makers, for whom it produces models that do not require large production volumes. Magna currently builds, among others, the Mercedes G-Class, the Aston Martin Rapide, the Mini Countryman and the Paceman,… BMW and Toyota plan to produce 60,000 units of each of their respective models, with preparations for production starting at the end of this coming spring.

Before that, specifically on 6 March, Toyota will present the Supra Concept in Geneva, the prototype that prefigures the definitive version of the Toyota Supra, which will be unveiled at the end of next autumn at the Tokyo Motor Show. The rebirth of the Supra is an event long awaited by the brand’s enthusiasts and by sports car fans. The legendary sports model from Toyota remained in production for 24 years, from 1978 to 2002.

Toyota now wants to bring the Supra back to life and recover with it its almost forgotten prestige as a manufacturer of sports vehicles. Thus, at the 2014 Detroit Motor Show it presented a more than attractive concept under the name FT-1 —the model to which the images illustrating this news belong— which previewed the lines of the Supra project. In an interview given to the English magazine EVO, the then director of Gazoo Racing, the division in charge of developing Toyota’s sports and higher-performance vehicles, Teysuya Tada, gave some details about the brand’s sporting future.

The data pointed to a construction based above all on achieving the maximum possible lightness of the whole, setting the challenge of being lighter than any of the direct rivals present on the market, in order to achieve, thanks to this, the best possible performance through a highly favourable power-to-weight ratio. To do so, Toyota would have various possible paths, although in no case would it follow the route of fitting a turbocharged four-cylinder engine, given the criticism Tada himself made in that interview regarding models such as the Porsche Boxster or Cayman.

That being the case, the normal option would be a large-displacement, high-power petrol engine or to opt for a simple petrol engine combined with a hybrid management system, given the Japanese manufacturer’s strong commitment to this technology. In fact, a possible development by Toyota of the 2.5-litre V6, to which an electrically driven turbocharger system would be added to incorporate it into this latter type of engine, has been suggested, which would make it possible to achieve greater output —delivering around 400 CV of maximum torque— without excessively penalising either consumption or emissions.

What does seem clear, at least from the teaser released by Toyota about its new sports car, is that the car will feature a hard top or fixed roof and a decidedly sporty and quite aggressive profile, in which the large rear spoiler will stand out, positioned quite high, which guarantees a high level of aerodynamic downforce to literally pin it to the ground, an unmistakable sign of the high performance it appears to promise, at least at first glance, from the future Supra.