During the presentation of the new Toyota GR Supra (A90) , Diogo had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Masayuki Kai, one of the main people responsible for the development of the new sports car.
As you can imagine, if there is a car that deserves a clarification session from its creators, it is definitely Supra, a name capable of generating strong emotions in the automotive world.
Controversy around the new Toyota GR Supra has been high since we learned several years ago that Toyota's partner in this project would be BMW; controversy that didn't subside when we saw the first specifications of the sport which revealed the presence of an inline six cylinder… of Bavarian origin to motivate the Supra.
Masayuki Kai helps us discover the reasons behind the decisions that determined Supra's development in this direction.
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Logically, many of the decisions taken reflect the need to make this project commercially viable, where we are witnessing a smaller and smaller global market for sports, which makes the task of placing a sports car of this type on the market and being profitable a much more complex task. than it would have been in the past.
According to Masayuki Kai, had Toyota made the decision to go alone with the development of a new Supra — new platform, new engine, specific components — we would still have been waiting for it to hit the market when it did, and when it did, it would be much more expensive (more 100 thousand euros).
It's just the lifting of the tip of the veil on the various topics discussed, always with the new Toyota GR Supra as the focus of conversation, between Diogo and Masayuki Kai — from the four-cylinder Supra, to how it matches up with the Porsche Cayman at the Nürburgring as far as what to expect from a hypothetical successor, nothing remained to be discussed. To not lose: