Toyota will bring the new 2020 Supra to Germany’s Nurburgring for the 24 Hours Endurance Race.
Toyota has been having a bad time at the Nurburgring lately. We’ve already seen one Supra crash during performance evaluations, and at last year’s 24-Hour Endurance Race, Toyota’s Gazoo Racing Lexus LC finished in 96th place (which was second-to-last place for the cars that actually managed to finish at all).
Now, we’re not blaming Toyota. The Nurburgring is a dangerous place, with 170 corners and 984 feet of elevation from its lowest to highest points. And at 15.5 miles long, it’s an enormous and challenging track for a race car driver to memorize at all, let alone exceed.
But this year Toyota hopes things will be different. Gazoo Racing is bringing a new car, the 2020 Toyota A90 Supra, to help enliven the team’s prospects.
The first time the GR Supra drove around The Green Hell was last fall at the VLN Endurance Championship. Toyota says the design has been “further refined” since then without going into any details as to how.
Photos in their press release reveal a car that looks almost identical to the GT4 Concept revealed last March--note the big front splitter and massive rear wing. Everything else looks mostly stock, which means the car has a 3.0-L inline 6-cylinder turbo under the hood, although we expect Gazoo Racing to have tweaked it to produce more than the 335 horsepower that Toyota advertises.
The Supra will have its work cut out for it. It’ll be racing in the SP8T class that allows engines up to 4.0-L with a turbocharger. This means it’ll face cars like the Mercedes-AMG GT4 and the BMW M2 Competition, both of which have quite a bit more horsepower than the Supra.
We’ll see how the Supra handles itself when qualifiers on June 20. Toyota will also send in their Lexus LC from last year, which hopefully has learned a thing or two since then.