These 10-second Toyota Supras are heading to SEMA

Modified

And you just know we had to make the obvious jokes here

This is a pair of tuned, 10-second Supras. That’s 10 seconds from a standing start to 400 metres away, for all the people who don’t live their lives a quarter mile at a time. And that makes them both pretty quick, regardless of how many times you change gear.

For its booth at this year’s SEMA, Toyota gave its Motorsports Garage team a pair of GR Supras, a $10,000 budget per car, and presumably some form of encouragement along the lines of, “I have faith in you, but this isn’t a junkyard. This is a garage”. And, after some tinkering, testing and presumably a montage, the Supras now have 620bhp, 590lb ft of torque, and the ability to smoke 355 Spiders in a drag race, whether or not said race is scored with just truly awful nu-metal music.

The path to more power was simple enough to save to floppy disk: one big turbo, two high-spec intercoolers, decat, big exhaust and a remap. The Supra’s gearbox and brakes were apparently up to the task, only needing a set of performance pads on the former and a transmission cooler on the latter. And yes, that means the gearbox is still the eight-speed auto, but that only means you won’t be in danger of wasting time granny shifting, not double-clutching like you should.

Of course, a 10-second car is one thing; a 10-second car on regular road tyres is something else entirely. And as the Supras remain resolutely rear-wheel-drive, you’ll find proper Mickey Thompson street-legal drag radials. Whether the extra power and grip actually requires it or if it’s just being on the safe side, the half shafts have been upgraded to deal with the larger forces and presumably unsympathetic launches.

After one such launch at a dragstrip, Toyota’s test driver scraped into the tens with a 10.984 quarter-mile ET. We’re not sure where the strip was, what the day was like or how close they were to blowing the welds on the intake, but that’s hardly a poor showing in any case.

And neither are either of these Supras. What they prove, just like the now-legendary A80 did, is that while the standard car is decent, it’s always better to consider it a base to work from. If you feel you’re owed a 10-second car, you can have one with 10 grand and an A90 – without the need to overnight parts from Japan. But then if you really need to decimate all (like those Civics with Spoon engines you just know are lurking somewhere at SEMA) then do as you feel. Just don’t go overboard – after all, it doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile.

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