Toyota GR Supra 2.0 Fast Fleet test – six months in the four-cylinder Porsche Cayman rival

It’s a uniquely horrible sound, and the moment you hear it you think: ‘Oh pants. Not that. Not here. Not right now.’

But then there’s rarely a convenient time to hear the ominous click-click-click of metal stuck in the tread of your tyre. Instead you realise you’re either going to be very late indeed to wherever you are heading, or that you won’t get there at all if the bloke at the tyre dealer (which you may or may not reach) does the full teeth-sucking routine and says, ‘Sorry, guv. Can’t plug that. You need a new tyre and we don’t have any of those in stock.’

Anyway, in this case the bloke at Kwik Fit confounded all my expectations and did the exact opposite. Once I’d limped the Supra onto his forecourt he took one look at the bolt head sticking out of its right-rear tyre and said, ‘No problem, my friend. Just stick it in front of the ramp over there and I’ll sort it.’ He had the Supra’s 18-inch Michelin Pilot Sport tyre off its rim within five minutes of me turning up. And no more than ten minutes after that I was on my way again, bolt head removed, puncture all nicely plugged, and me a mere tenner less well off.

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On my way home it occurred to me that you really do learn to appreciate something so much more if you’re faced with the prospect of being without it, even for the most fleeting of moments. Which maybe explains why my affection for the Supra increased palpably in the hours after its run-in with the bolt head, and during the subsequent days before it went back to Toyota GB.

To be honest I didn’t quite gel with the GR Supra 2.0 to begin with. I found its absence of grunt unentertaining for quite some time. I wanted the 254bhp four-cylinder engine to sound better than it did, too. I also struggled to get on with the cabin, which I found intimate to the point of mild claustrophobia on occasions, especially at dusk, and even more so if it was raining. I thought the ride was good in Normal mode but way too busy in Sport, and I found its eight-speed automatic gearbox frustrating for much of the time due to its lack of any real zip.

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Yet now it’s gone I miss the Supra much more than I thought I was going to. I miss the way it looks from the rear three-quarters and especially dead-on from the rear, an angle from which I think it looks very tasty indeed. I miss its sharp but easy-going steering responses. And with fuel costing what it does right now, I most definitely miss its ability to effortlessly travel 35 miles or more on just one gallon of fuel.

Even the engine and gearbox I got used to and learned to like, as you tend to do with most cars. I learned that to get the best out of it I needed to customise the settings in the Individual mode so that the steering, engine and transmission were all in Sport while the damping was in Normal. This kept the ride nicely intact while switching the engine and gearbox to notably more aggressive maps and putting the exhaust into its Sport setting.

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And that’s how I drove it pretty much everywhere, although if a really good road appeared in the windscreen and there was no one else about I would sometimes override the Individual mode and whack everything, including the dampers, into Sport. This would sharpen up the body control a touch but also put a big dent in the ride quality. So invariably I’d switch the dampers back to Normal after a few minutes anyway.

Nothing fell off or broke or stopped working on the Supra – it ran like clockwork. But then you expect that from a Toyota; it’s part of its appeal. In fact the only genuine problem I had during our 5200 miles together was the aforementioned one with the tyre, but that very much comes under the sh*t happens chapter of life and wasn’t in any way the car’s fault.

Overall, the GR Supra 2.0 was a good but not earth-moving experience. That’s damning it with faint praise, I’m well aware, but in the end it was a bit better than just averagely OK. Yet I miss it more than I should, damn it, even if it does desperately need a more memorable powertrain. 

This story was first featured in evo issue 302.