The TRD 3000GT Was The Ultimate Toyota Supra

Let’s rewind to 1994 for a second. The A80 Toyota Supra has been on sale for a few months now, and although it’s launched to a warm reception, we’re still some time off it reaching cult status. This was years before tuners had made the most of the 2JZ, The Fast and The Furious reached cinemas, or Gran Turismo with the Castrol-liveried JGTC race cars was even in development.

In fact, the real Castrol racers were still a little way off hitting the track. 1994 would see the debut of the A80 Toyota Supra in the JGTC for the championship’s second year, with Toyota Racing Development (TRD) hard at work developing a car it hoped could beat the Nissan Skyline GT-R.

Before any A80 would see on-track action though, TRD had decided to give the public a taste of what to expect with a very, very special road car. Revealed at the Tokyo Auto Salon at the start of the year, the TRD 3000GT was – and arguably still is – the ultimate road-going Supra.

The TRD 3000GT was 60mm wider at the front and 50mm at the rear

TRD lifted the bodywork from the wind-tunnel-honed JGTC GT1-spec race car and fitted it to the 3000GT, which included its wider arches, adding 60mm of width to the front and 500mm at the rear.

The front bumper was much more aggressive than the standard Supra with a gargantuan mouth, said to swallow twice as much air, with new cooling ducts sitting behind the front wheel arches. Even larger ducts fed air over the rear wheels while helping to cool the 2JZ and reduce air pressure in the engine bay was a quad-vented bonnet.

While the rear bumper perhaps wasn’t the most aggressive thing, though had been reprofiled, the gigantic – and functional – TRD-spec wing did more than enough to give the rear of the car serious presence. It could be manually adjusted at six different angles, depending on how much downforce you wanted. Further still, a boxier ‘Type-R’ wing with a third, central pillar was available as an option.

The huge front grille was said to suck in twice as much air

Bodywork changes were the main focus of the 3000GT, but a bit of work was done under the skin. Stiffer, lower suspension was fitted, along with an upgraded intake for the engine, albeit the official power figure remained at 276bhp, despite special-edition models being exempt from the Japanese gentleman’s agreement.

Although the 3000GT was a useful advert for the TRD parts catalogue, with each individual part available to existing Supra owners, 35 fully complete cars were built. Tracing a price is a seemingly impossible task, and it’s very, very rare any come up for sale.

The last we could find was in 2019 with an auction starting price of 9,000,000 yen (approx. (£47,000) albeit without a published final figure.

TOM’s will sell you a faithful replica today

If you’re desperate for one though, TOM’s, the racing team which ran those famous Castrol Supras in JGTC in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, is taking commissions for a faithful replica. It’ll cost you about £125,000, though…