Shake Your Rump

TOYOTA PULLS BACK THE CURTAIN ON ITS TRYST WITH BMW AND REVEALS THE BEST DRIVER’S CAR IT’S EVER BUILT.

- Josh Jacquot

Tetsuya Tada, the 2020 Toyota Supra’s chief engineer, can be cagey. He shrewdly avoids being nailed down about the range of the car’s variable-ratio steering rack and the engine’s peak boost pressure. He won’t say if the Supra is quicker around a track than the Porsche 718 Cayman S, which was its primary development benchmark. And he tells a cautious story about the relationship with BMW that allowed this iconic Toyota sports car to exist again, 21 years after the death of the Mark IV Supra.

That the fifth-generation Supra is a proper sports car, however, lies in clear relief against the uncertainty of a few details. We drove the car at Summit Point Motorsports Park in West Virginia, asking much of its chassis, brakes, and powertrain over a day of merciless lapping. Those laps revealed that the right people won many battles during development and that Toyota is once again taking the sports car seriously. Spoiler alert: This review will not mention dreadful, if popular, movie franchises or aging, overweight Toyota inline-sixes.

This Supra’s rollout has been shrouded in a cloud of perceived compromise by internet charlatans since the announcement that it would share its platform with the BMW Z4 convertible. Supra loyalists weren’t shy in expressing their indignation about the union, claiming that a Supra without a manual transmission could never be a true Supra and that a co-developed car was destined to be viewed by history as nothing more than a Toyota badge slapped onto a BMW.