A Hotter Toyota 'Supra GRMN' Is In The Works

The anticipated power output for the Toyota Supra of 335bhp sounds potent enough, but that hasn’t stopped grumblings arising from some corners of the Internet. To an extent, we get it - since the most powerful fourth-gen Supra - discontinued over 16 years ago - was damn near as powerful, that’s not exactly progress, is it?

But here’s the thing: just like the last Supra, it looks like be more than one output available. When asked at a roundtable interview at the 24 Hours of Le Mans whether Toyota make a more hardcore ‘GRMN’ version of the Supra, chief engineer Tetsuya Tada said that “I would want to introduce somethig like that eventually,” adding, “we are preparing for it.”

No further details were given, but assuming this more extreme version has more power, it could even end up with the ‘S55’ inline-six from the BMW M3/M4. After all, Tada-san did confirm in the interview that as part of Toyota’s joint sports car venture with BMW the standard car will indeed use an engine from the German firm, which will almost certainly be the ‘B58’ also found in the likes of the M140i and 440i. Using the S55 for the next version up makes sense.

That’d give the car a 0-62mph time in the low 4s at least, possibly nudging it just below the four-second mark. It would however be quite expensive, given that the base car is already expected to be well over $60,000 in the USA.

As for the most extreme version, you’ve already seen it. We’re talking about the GR Supra Racing Concept (above) revealed at Geneva earlier this year, which was “not a show car,” Tada-san noted. “We put that car in a wind tunnel specifically for developing race cars…If there were certain areas which didn’t meet the certification, we went back to the mass production car and changed it so the race car we will introduce will be certifiable [for FIA WEC GTE regulations],” he explained.

Make no mistake, the future of the Supra is very exciting indeed.