Inside track: Testing the new Toyota Supra on a PlayStation
This is not a Supra. Well, not a real one at least...
Is America's more powerful Supra really better than the UK version? We fire up the games console to find out
The Toyota GR Supra is a much more spacious two-seat coupé than I remember. There’s at least six feet of head room from my seated position, more wood than is typical in a Japanese sports car and softer furnishings, too.
Hold on, this is my living room… But we’ll come back to that. There’s a new, 2021-model-year Supra for the US market, you see, which will go on sale there this month. And it has more power. “Because, why not?” says the strapline in America.
I’ll tell you why not, m’laddio: because of EU emissions legislation. So the 37bhp power boost that the Supra is allowed in the US, taking the output of its straight-six engine from 335bhp to 382bhp, won’t make it to cars sold in Europe.
What might, though, are elements of a revised suspension set-up. There are different chassis tunes for Europe and the US already, but in the States the 2021 Supra gets strut braces, new bump stops, new damper tuning and revised calibration for its power steering, adaptive dampers, stability control and e-differential. All this is to tighten the car’s control and push it more towards being a hardcore sports car than a soft grand touring coupé.
The European-spec 2021 Supra might get some of those elements or it might not. We’d love to tell you which elements work and which ones don’t, but the car hasn’t made it to Europe and, even if it had, I wouldn’t be able to travel anywhere to try it.
So here I am in my living room, in front of a Sony PlayStation, a steering wheel, pedals and the game Gran Turismo Sport, having downloaded both the current and 2021 US-spec Supras. Can a review work this way?
It might. Simulators, it should be noted, are already a big deal in the automotive industry (see above right), allowing quick assessment and development of cars that physically behave like the real thing. I’ll try to do similar, with a back-to-back test of existing and revised Supras. On a ‘car set-up’ screen, Gran Turismo reckons the new Supra has a 3mm-lower ride height and that, while the suspension geometry and damper rates are unchanged (they’re different in reality), the limited-slip differential is tuned more aggressively.
Going from old to new car, what I notice first is a change in urgency – the rate the needle moves around the rev counter. The new power peak of 382bhp, 14% higher than it was, is made between 5800rpm and the 3.0-litre engine’s limiter at 6500rpm, rather than from 5000-6500rpm. Torque is up too, although not by so much: from 365lb ft at 1600-4500rpm to 368lb ft at 1800-5000rpm. So it’s peakier, and I can feel it.
The sound, so far as I can tell, is the same: smooth and zingy (even the actual Supra can sound synthesised), although with a pop on the overrun that I don’t remember on the real car. On bumpier circuits, though, the 2021 Supra feels immediately better controlled than its predecessor. There’s less body roll and tighter control over crests and dips, which makes it easier to place.
That body movements are tighter means there’s less obvious weight transfer, so you can trail the brakes towards a corner without overloading the front tyres so readily and pushing into understeer.
If you don’t push beyond the older car’s front end, the weight shift is more liable to send it into early oversteer. But given the tighter settings, combined with the limited-slip differential’s higher lock-up rate under braking (which promotes stability), the 2021 car is less prone to both initial understeer and falling into early oversteer.
It will still slide – this is a turbocharged rear-wheel-drive car that produces nearly 400bhp, after all – but when it does, it does so with fine control. So it feels more sporting than the original. It’s still less agile than the mid-engined cars in a similar class, but you can drive it into corners on the steering and the brakes more easily, then drive it out on the throttle, rather than it falling into oversteer early and squidging through the middle of a corner as you gas it up before the apex.
What this means for the ride quality is a different matter entirely, obviously. My old kart seat on the floor of my front room gets no more comfortable from one Supra to the other, or indeed to anything else. Ditto the steering, which feels the same to me. Even the best simulator steering set-ups tell you what’s going on differently to how a real car does.
But there’s no question that you can sense the handling changes through Gran Turismo Sport, and they’re worthwhile. Let’s just hope they’re more accurately simulated than the head room.
*JUST HOW REALISTIC ARE DRIVING SIMULATORS?*
Can you really test a car on a driving simulator? To an extent, yes, because if you couldn’t, car makers and racing teams wouldn’t put such great stock in them. When it costs £15 million to make each real prototype but perhaps £2m for the world’s best simulator, you can see why they appeal.
As Billy Johnson, a racing and development driver for Ford, told me last year: “It might cost $200,000 [£164,000] to take a car and six engineers to the Nürburgring. Here on an advanced simulator in Ford’s workshop, they can drive a road car on six of the world’s great race tracks in a day.” The same applies at my house with my PlayStation.
A simulator must do two things. First, replicate what a car is doing. That’s the easy bit, because the physics are the physics, so they can be modelled. Harder is convincing the driver that he or she is actually behind the wheel, without real visual or physical cues. The best simulators (Ansible Motion and Cranfield Simulation make the best I’ve tried) have motion cues that do that.
I’ve always felt that, for a humble game, Gran Turismo does a good job of replicating vehicle dynamics – and, more important, telling a player who is denied real motion what the car is doing. Certainly, you can tell small differences between two Supras.
*READ MORE*
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*M3-engined Toyota Supra ‘possible but unlikely’ says M division boss*