The new Toyota Supra made its “world debut” on Thursday at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, once again reminding us that we still don’t know a lot about the car and that Toyota likes it that way. We haven’t even seen it, really.
Details, though, right?
If we’re counting, this is about the fourth Supra debut since Toyota announced it was bringing the car back in March. Toyota announced the car’s production plans with the GR Supra Racing Concept, then debuted a NASCAR Xfinity Series version that’s shaped nothing like the street car and will run a V8. Since Toyota never said anything about the original GR Racing Concept’s specs, we learned its 591-horsepower figure from Gran Turismo Sport, of all things.
Now, we’re here.
Whichever number debut we’re on now, Toyota’s calling it the “world debut” of the street car. The company sent a development Supra model to the Goodwood Festival of Speed to make hillclimb runs this weekend in a camouflage wrap, because what good is a car debut unless you prolong it for at least a year?
With Toyota’s announcement of this Goodwood debut earlier this week, we got confirmation that the car will keep the Supra’s historically inline-six engine and rear-wheel-drive layout. We’ve also known for a while now that it’s a Toyota-BMW collaboration, and the sound is reminiscent of an M3 in this video.
We don’t know much else, other than the plan is for the Supra to come onto the market in the first half of 2019 and that the chances of a manual transmission are about as good as the chances of Toyota debuting the car in a normal, non-frustrating manner. (“Debut” should probably be in quotation marks there.)
But that won’t happen. The secrecy seems to be part of the fun for Toyota.