By now, everyone’s pretty well aware of the fact that the new Toyota Supra is actually a BMW Z4 in very stylish Japanese clothing. Some enthusiasts hate that fact, feeling as if BMW sucked all the life out of the Supra. While other are impressed by its performance and understand that it would have never been made without BMW’s help. However, could BMW have potentially helped make the Supra better than it ever was? Is it blasphemous to even ponder such things? This new video from Top Gear tries to find out.
In this new video, Top Gear’s Becky Evans pits the new A90 Toyota Supra (aka the “Zupra”) up against the iconic A80 “Mk4” Toyota Supra. The latter of which was always beloved by Supra enthusiast but it reached legendary status thanks to the Fast and Furious franchise. Is it actually as legendary as people remember or has nostalgia clouded everyone’s judgement? To find out, Evans drives both cars back-to-back in Top Gear’s test track before handing them over to The Stig, to set lap times.
Under the skin, the cars are barely similar but they do share one similarity–engine type. Despite having 20 years in between them and different companies making the engines, both cars use 3.0-liter turbocharged inline-six engines. Obviously, the older A80 car uses a Toyota 2JZ engine, the iconic, incredibly tunable straight-six, while the new car uses a BMW B58 engine, which is also shockingly tunable and brilliant in its own right.
The older Supra’s engine is tuned in this video, putting out a very healthy 520 horsepower, which is quite a bit more than the BMW-Supra’s 374 horsepower (382 horsepower in North America). However, the new Supra uses a ZF eight-speed auto, which is far better than the archaic four-speed auto found in the older Supra. Let’s be real, the new Supra was obviously faster on track, despite having less power. Its superior grip and quicker shifting gearbox made it far more capable. However, the real question is: which would you rather own?
