![]() On the plus side, when Porsche made the GT3 a PDK-only car, there was frothing uproar followed by queues around das block for the 911 R and manual GT3 Touring. Is anyone actually going to buy a manual GR Supra? But now, here, today, the Supra seems like it’s really coming good. Neither the six-cyl or the 2.0-litre quite hit the spot. There used to be a bit of a sense of ‘why did you bother’ about the Supra – all those BMW bits so unconvincingly reanimated. It’s not a night-and-day reinvention that suddenly takes the GR Supra to Alpine A110 levels of interactivity and poise, but it’s absolutely going in the right direction. Turn-in is crisper, the rear axle doesn’t feel like it’s lazily flopping along in your wake like a fish on a line, and you’ve a clearer idea of when the rear-drive chassis might give way to pop out for skids and giggles. But the first impressions are very positive. We’ve only had a handful of laps on a bone dry Spanish racetrack to test this new Supra – all cars from 2022 onwards will get the handling fettling. And even the traction control’s had a sense of humour upgrade. There’s new calibration for the Supra’s numb electric power steering too. The adaptive suspension has been retuned. The chemistry of the rubber used in the suspension has been changed, so it’s less bendy. It’s not that Toyota knew the GR Supra was a bit of a pudding, but… they haven’t half been busy tweaking it. in that it now has a personality.īut just as many plaudits are due to the team who’ve had nothing to do with the gearbox. Obviously the manual’s going to be slower off the line and less frugal on the motorway with only six ratios instead of eight, but on first impression it’s had a personality transplant. It’s also changed the car’s character: where there were once slurry-smooth upshifts, there’s now physical interaction and the jeopardy of hitting the redline. The manual conversion has settled into Supra life beautifully. The clutch pedal keeps up when you want to change in a hurry and it’s easy to heel-and-toe. The shift is a peach: slick, weighted just-so and free from notchiness. ![]() ![]() That all saves 38.3kg, which isn’t much, but takes the porky Supra in the right direction, towards the 1.5-tonne threshold. The manual is of course lighter than the automatic gearbox, and then there’s the GR Yaris-alike wheels and a revised hi-fi. Two hundred grammes! Couldn’t the Supra do with losing a bit of weight?Ībsolutely, and it has.
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