What's the news?
To say that the arrival of the new Toyota Supra is 'hotly anticipated' is to vastly undersell both the concepts of heat and anticipation. As the successor to a nigh-legendary line of straight-six coupes stretching back to the seventies, we've been waiting for the new Supra in the way that a hungry dog awaits Pedigree Chum.
We've a while longer to wait - the new Supra won't be driven by anyone outside of Toyota until later this year at the earliest but at least anyone attending this weekend's Goodwood Festival of Speed will be able to get a look at the new car running. A camouflaged prototype of the new Supra will be driven up Goodwood's (surprisingly tricky) driveway hillclimb by Chief Engineer Tetsuya Tada (him of GT86 fame) and Toyota test driver Herwig Daenens.
The Supra will also make an appearance on the Toyota stand at Goodwood. The Toyota GR Supra Racing Concept will be there, sitting alongside it's (distant) cousin, the TS050 Hybrid LMP1 Race car that (finally) took an historic win for Toyota at this year's Le Mans 24hrs. Both cars, and to an extent the Supra road car, were made for Toyota by its in house racing team, GAZOO Racing. Indeed, the Racing Concept Supra has, apparently, been designed with Le Mans/World Endurance Championship LM-GTE regulations in mind which means maybe, just maybe, we might see it racing against Ferrari, Ford, Aston Martin et al. in due course.
So far, all we know of the Supra's technical specification is that it shares a rear-wheel drive chassis (and its rear-drive only; early rumours of a four-wheel drive version were wide of the mark) with the new BMW Z4, and both cars will make their debts with a shared 3.0-litre turbocharged straight-six engine, developing around 350hp. This being Toyota, a hybrid version is more or less guaranteed at some point, although we don't know yet whether that will be a hybridised straight-six, or a transplanted V6 hybrid from the Lexus LC 500h.