Contemporary legends: Toyota GT86
In the section “Contemporary legends” I want to highlight modern cars that has a big influence on the world’s car culture. This can be either sport or economic or even influence on society. And surely these cars will make it into history even being in production still. And first of them is Toyota GT86 — naturally-aspirated FR (front-engined, rear-wheel-drive) car. And that is especially interesting in the turbo-era in which we are living now.
Though I love automotive history we’re not gonna dig into it too much. Just want to mention that the name of GT86 links to the combination of 2000GT and AE86 Toyotas, which both were built with the similar setup:
To show how interested people were in this car I’ll give you some numbers of the first year of production: 7000 orders for Toyota GT86 and 3500 orders for Subaru BRZ (ah yeah, it’s the same car, but you should probably know this). Only Scion FR-S (American name for Toyota GT86, this also you should know) has collected 10000 orders. More than 20k orders in total, impressive yeah?
Design. Hmmm… I can’t say that GT86 is a beautiful car, but it shouldn’t be so. The best characteristic I can give to it is that the form serves the function perfectly. Long bonnet with the short end repeats the classic shape of sportback coupe. The main idea was to create the effective rear-wheel drive sports car. And Toyota engineers carried out in a best way. The Subaru’s boxer engine allowed to lower center of gravity and provided great handling characteristics complemented with a low drag coefficient of 0.27. For me sounds like a simple and good equation. The result is around 6 seconds from 0 to 100 km/h and 233 km/h of top speed.
And then how to emphasize the sport essence of the car and attract even more petrol-heads? Racing of course! But you cannot put your car in a race if the initial construction is bad, though it’s not the case with GT86. All the elements are in place and almost perfect weight distribution (53:47) gave the green light to Toyota GT86 to the race tracks.
Various versions of Toyota GAZOO Racing for Japanese championships, endurance races, Super GT Series. There are even mono-class series for GT86 such as American 86CUP time-attack series or Toyota 86 Racing Series. The production silhouette competed even in Pikes Peaks Hill Climb. I can continue this list to make you bored.
With the popularity the business comes. Hell amount of aftermarket tuning parts. You can basically make your GT86 look completely different from the stock. How the car community usually say: life’s too short to live stock. Feeling to go extreme with the Rocket Bunny style kit — here it is, or maybe something more humble? There are plenty of choices starting from small LED lights for your bumper to the complete body kits from various suppliers. Naturally-aspirated 200 hp engine doesn’t deliver enough for you? Turbo kits at your disposal. You can modify every single piece of your GT86 just check the depth of your pocket.
Are you wondering of buying Toyota GT86 or looking for some information related to it? Just Google it and you’ll end up with the massive amount of forums, comminities and web-sites. Within almost 10 years on the market Toyota GT86 left a huge footprint in the automotive society and there’s no doubt that it’s true contemporary legend that will stay for long in petrolheads hearts.
Bonus video:
Take care!
