Early ’90s Japan sometimes seems like an almost bottomless pit of bizarre cars that couldn’t have happened any other place or time. It feels like a monthly tradition to rediscover some of its forgotten spawn, from snail-themed kei vans to Humvee-esque Toyota off-roaders. Today’s rediscovery, though, is a little-known option for the iconic Toyota Supra that we’re surprised we didn’t already know about: Factory widebody kits styled after Toyota’s JGTC race cars.
Launched before the 1994 JGTC season according to Toyota UK’s official blog, the TRD 3000GT was a body conversion for Supra road cars that dressed them up like factory racers. These bodies widened the Supra’s fenders by 2.4 inches up front, 2.0 inches in the rear, and added a comprehensive suite of aerodynamic and cooling improvements. A gaping grille took in almost twice the airflow of the standard street car, while a splitter, flat underbody, skirts, and a rear wing reduced lift. Toyota produced 35 complete TRD 3000GT conversions, each with their own non-Supra VINs, though it also sold all the kit’s components as dealer options, with one set of them ending up on a 1993 Supra that was recently imported to California.
This Supra appears to wear full TRD 3000GT regalia minus the flat underbody, which is neither shown in photos nor listed in its ad on Toprank Importers. Mods to the chassis are more conservative, consisting of Tein coilovers and Lexus LS400-sourced brake calipers, which hide behind SSR Professor M5 wheels. As is typical of Supra owners, this car’s last owner poured most of their investment into the crown jewel under the Supra’s hood, the 3.0-liter, twin-turbo 2JZ-GTE inline-six, which they upgraded with an array of name-brand performance parts, many of them HKS. Being a turbo car, its transmission is none other than a six-speed manual, one shifted through a leather knob swimming in a sea of carbon (possibly a wrap) overlaid on the dash.
Going by photos of the Real McCoy on Toyota UK’s official blog, which show a different exhaust and no front bumper badge, this car is likely titled as a Supra, and not as one of the 35 TRD cars. Even so, its asking price of $84,995 doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, as it is still a rare factory widebody, one with just under 47,000 miles on the clock. Given what some dealerships ask for turbo Supras with that kind of mileage, one could do a lot worse than to buy a car with as much provenance as this one. Just be sure to yank that taped-in tablet from the dash—yuck.
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