Why we finally love the Toyota Supra – just as it gets the axe

With a limited-run Final Edition special, the Toyota GR Supra is about to depart this earthly realm, nearly six years after it was launched early in 2019 at the Detroit motor show.

It doesn’t seem like six years to me, even though Toyota had been talking about building a new Supra since 2012, we saw prototypes in 2018 and in September 2019 I drove a still-disguised pre-production ‘A90’.

Perhaps it’s my age, but it still seems like the Supra hasn’t long arrived, and yet with a 429bhp special, away it goes.

Not that it was that easy to buy one in the UK later in its life anyway. This market was granted a small annual allocation of cars and the Supra was in and out of Toyota’s price lists as a result.

The Final Edition is limited to 300 examples globally, and it’s not year clear how many the UK will get.

But it brings with it a serious number of changes: extra power, adjustable KW dampers from a GT4 track variant, new drilled brake discs, an Akrapovic exhaust, baffles in the sump to prevent oil starvation, extra body bracing, exterior aerodynamic addenda and some incredibly uncomfortable-looking seats. Sounds like a proper circuit weapon.

But even though it seems (to me) like the Supra has been around for no time at all, my attitude towards it has shifted markedly – totally unlike, say, how I feel about the Alpine A110, which hasn’t had too dissimilar a lifespan.

I loved the A110 at launch and still love it the same way now. (Incidentally, while the A110 is still around, its non-compliance with the EU’s General Safety Regulations 2 means Alpine can sell no more than 1500 across Europe per year. Why hasn’t the UK exempted itself from this? Why aren’t we marching on parliament to demand more A110s?) 

Meanwhile, the Supra is a car that I think I like more now than when in 2019 our road test found “it left us wanting more”. 

It was something of a ‘not quite’ car: not quite an A110, not quite a Porsche 718 Cayman. Good but perhaps the least satisfying of the group of cars that all decided they might be able to take on the Porsche all at the same time.

Today I’m more sold on the general attitude of the Supra than ever. I don’t want ‘more’ than the ordinary one, with a six-cylinder engine, an automatic gearbox and whatever else it came with at the time.

While it has a 51:49 weight distribution (remember, the platform is shared with the BMW Z4) and it’s a quick coupé and surely it’s agile enough, it cuts a relatively relaxed vibe when you’re driving one.

And I’m here for that. As a future classic car, it has bags of appeal, in my view.

I think some cars do get more appealing as they age, and as yet I haven’t put my finger on exactly why.

But sports cars that weren’t class-leading at the time but seem more mellow now are certainly chief among them. A mate has an early Mercedes-Benz SLK, far from the world’s greatest roadster new, but he loves it as a summer cruiser, and I get it.

The other week, I drove around parts of the US where it’s common for people to park a car by the side of busier roads with ‘for sale’ signs in the windows.

I mostly saw run-down muscle cars, old pick-up trucks and scabby 4x4s. All were surely pretty dreadful to drive, yet it would almost be worth moving there just to be able to buy and daily any of them.

Plus, I think in the Supra’s case, as is the way with many other Japanese sports cars, the lack of an immediate replacement brings an extra sense of loss.

There were decades between Honda NSXs, there’s no Toyota MR2 or Celica at the moment, nor is there a Honda S2000 and nor can you buy a rotary-engined Mazda coupé.

The Japanese seem more comfortable with hiatuses coming between models. Maybe they knew to appreciate the Supra more when it was around, rather than just when it looked like it was going.