With the recent introduction of the long-awaited Mk5 BMW Toyota Supra, we felt now was an excellent time to revisit the history of a very important Mk4, a car which used a most unexpected engine to propel itself to motorsports and 32-bit glory. BaT contributor Blake Z. Rong tells its story below.

-BaT

It could be tempting to paint all console racing gamers with the same brush: nerdy, vitamin D-deficient basement-dwelling kids spending all day in front of a TV screen, still too young to drive a three-dimensional car on three-dimensional roads. And yet, franchises like Forza, and in particular Gran Turismo, stirred a real and lasting enthusiasm for the world of JDM forbidden fruit, and today those kids have emerged from their basements fully grown and gainfully employed, snapping up Japan’s 90’s national automotive treasures at an alarming rate.

While today it’s a given that North American enthusiasts will be at least partially familiar with the legend of Nissan’s four-wheel drive Skyline GT-Rs, questions may remain: what is Super GT? What is TOM’s? And just how was Godzilla defeated with a mere four-cylinder?

Go back to 1993, an era before Sony dabbled in video gaming: that year, the Japanese Grand Touring Championship launched, replacing the Japan Touring Car Championships. The motorsports world was shifting away from prototypes to the burgeoning grand touring class, with recognizable silhouettes, heavy weight and power restrictions, and international invitations. Fueled by the Japanese sports car boom, the early years would eventually feature the mightiest Supras, Skylines, and Honda NSXs. Even foreign exotics like the McLaren F1 and Porsche 962 entered the fray.

In 1989, Nissan introduced the R32-generation Skyline, a landmark car that wore, for the first time since the 1970s, the GT-R badge. Nissan entered it in the older JTCC series. And just like twenty years earlier, the Skyline dominated. Out of 29 events over the next four years, it won every single race.

That first year of the JGTC saw an abbreviated season: just four races. Skylines continued winning. In the first full season of 1994, Masahiko Kageyama took the championship in a Calsonic-blue Skyline GT-R–this time contending against Ferrari F40s, Porsche 993s, and even the Le Mans legend 962. The series changed, but the dominance continued.

This was the world that arch-rival Toyota entered in 1995, in its first full effort to beat the champ. Toyota had just introduced the Mk4 Supra in 1993, a car that needs no further introduction, and a perfect platform to start. It enlisted its longstanding racing division, Tachi Oiwa Motor Sports, or TOM’s, which may surprise you that there is no actual Tom involved. TOM’s Supra wore the red, white, and green of Castrol, a splashy, swirly livery that evokes a quintessential Nineties, cemented in certain brains through 640×480 pixels. More importantly, TOM’s found a loophole: JGTC regulations allowed a manufacturer to use any engine they built, not just what was originally under the hood.

So instead of the 2JZ straight-six, TOM’s threw in the 3S-GT turbocharged 2.0 liter four-cylinder from the Celica GT-Four, currently ruling the World Rally Championship (through certain chicanery, no less). It was smaller, lighter, and more efficient, and more importantly, tunable–to nearly 500 horsepower. Nissan stuck with its stock-derived RB six in the Skyline, but Toyota now had a new trick up its sleeve.

And the trick worked. Nissan won the first race at Suzuka that year, a Porsche 911 GT2 won at Mt. Fuji, but Toyota came ahead in the third race at Sendai. Masanori Sekiya led. That same year, Sekiya took a McLaren F1 GTR and won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, opening a record book of firsts: the first win by a Japanese driver, the first win by McLaren, and four out of the five top places filled with GT1-class McLarens, toppling the prototype class.

A year later, these McLarens set their sights on JGTC, and did for the series what they did at Le Mans: they dominated every round, dampening the intensity of the Toyota/Nissan rivalry, and turning the season into the only year not won by a Japanese team. Both Supra and Skyline won just one race apiece.

1997 was the turning point. Calsonic pulled out, and a new team called Zexel came in with a Skyline. TOM’s added a car and expanded its driver roster to include Michael Krumm and future F1 driver Pedro de la Rosa. Krumm pushed his Supra to the first win of the season at Sendai, where the car first won. Now, TOM’s biggest rival weren’t just Skylines, but also the fellow Supras of Team SARD, another Toyota works team. Following the first five races, both Supra teams had won twice.

Still, SARD led with a massive 16-point lead over TOM’s. Somehow, by the end of the season, TOM’s dropped this deficit to just 4 points. Both teams finished with exactly two wins, two second-places, and precisely 67 points apiece.

It was a first in JGTC driver’s championship history: a tiebreaker. The draw was broken on podium finishes–Krumm had one third-place finish at Fuji, and that’s what did it. The title went first to TOM’s Supra, then SARD’s Supra. Toyota had pitted two of its teams against each other, and handily forgot about Skylines.

Nissan came back swinging in 1998 with the R33 GT-R, lurid in its black-and-yellow Pennzoil livery. That year, Toyota didn’t win a single race–Honda joined the rivalry, and its NSX won what races the Skyline didn’t. In fact, Krumm left Toyota to join Nissan’s NISMO, and the Skyline won again in 1999. Castrol and Toyota parted ways in 2001. That year, a Supra beat both Honda, Nissan, and McLaren to win.





The Supra won four championships total. Even after the car went out of production in 2002 in Japan, teams continued racing the Mk4 until 2006, now with the big 3UZ-FE V8 from the Toyota Soarer, our Lexus SC430, a car which would replace the Supra in competition a year later.

Ultimately it took three years and some foreign involvement, but Toyota finally made it–and with a changing of the guard, its Supra became a legend. Certainly Kazunori Yamauchi knew so when he created Gran Turismo. And for many an American nerd, it was the first glimpse into the strange, wild, rivalrous world of Japanese motorsport.

– Blake Z. Rong

images: TOM’s, Toyota, Nissan, GT Association