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The mkiv Supra Owners Club

Hi from an ex-Toyota newbie! :) (APRIL FOOLS!!!)


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Hi everyone,

 

I'm new here so please be gentle!!

 

My name is Bob Cunningham. I used to work for Toyota as a durability test driver and as part of my job I got to work on the Supra from 1991 to 1993 just prior to it’s release. Absolutely loved it and owned one for 8 years - brilliantly engineered with only a few achilles heels which I won't go into as everyone is no doubt aware of them given the expertise on display on this great site. God knows how I didn't find this place sooner - it's certainly a goldmine of information!!

 

Anyways, I Left Toyota in 1995 and now work at an aluminium fabricators as a general manager (yes, much more boring but I'm getting old!).

 

Technically I've driven in excess of a million miles in a Supra if you count the accelerated durability testing ha ha :) I learned a good deal about that side of things through my ownership and also learned a great deal of engine stuff through talking to engineers when I got the chance.

 

One of my friends, Gary, recently bought one and he’s looking to go single turbo in the near future. However, Gary is so non-techie (mechanically and computer wise!) that I was looking for some advice and so signed up the this forum to help Gary out.

 

Modifications were never really my strong point as everything was, obviously, focussed around stock setups. So here I am to meet you guys and hopefully learn about modding these wonderful cars and also to refresh my memory on maintenance and troubleshooting. Maybe I can even help out being ex-Toyota? Who knows!

 

Bob.

 

APRIL FOOLS!!!

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Hi Bob - welcome to the club! :thumbs:

 

Great to have you on board and it'll be nice to learn some golden nuggets of information from you on the Supra - what Toyota were thinking throughout the development - myths on it being a detuned 450bhp engine etc etc.

 

Cheers,

 

Brian.

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Whoa! Busy place this, I didn't expect anyone to get back so quick!

 

Thank you all for making me feel so welcome :)

 

The model certainly evolved throughout the durability testing and a good deal of thanks has to go to the Soarer in that respect - we used them as discreet test mules mainly in the early stages of development for parts and concept testing including the 2JZ-GE and 2JZ-GTE powerplants and suspension / brake configuration work.

 

The first Supra bodied test mules were heavily disguised but already highly evolved from all the parts testing we'd already done. That rumour about the power output has an element of truth - Toyota badly wanted to blow the opposition away with the release of the mkiv and early 2JZ-GTE's fitted into the Soarer test mules had in excess of 400ps. In the end, they detuned it a little mainly because of the Japanese manufacturers 'gentlemans agreement' that came about meaning a power cap of 280ps. We quoted that figure but really we had to fudge it a little - the production powerplants were producing in excess of 320ps!

 

As far as this whole j spec / uk spec thing I've been reading about on here - they were different cars for different markets. The domestic model didn't need to do high speed stops (well, above 112mph anyways) so the emphasis was on low to medium speed response and driveability. The export market car (which the UK and US got) had an emphasis on medium to high speed GT style driveability - hence the different cams and smaller steel based turbines.

 

Personally I always enjoyed driving the domestic model more - it felt so much more 'alive' on winding roads.

 

As for the over engineered bit - that's partly down to the originally planned higher power output plus Toyota back then always erred on the side of caution to ensure reliability and the safeguarding of their reputation which was in it's infancy at the time, especially following the whole mk3 head gasket debacle.

 

Bob.

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