Drive Flashback: 1993 Toyota Supra Turbo - RoadandTrack.com (blog)
This article originally appeared in the March 1993 issue of Road & Track . Roughly 40 times year a brand-new car lands in our laps to be driven, tested, photographed, its details dissected / and then finally judged as a success, failure or also-ran. And just between you and me, I'd guess that in about half of these cases, we quietly wish the cars designers had asked us for a few opinions before they'd finished polishing the tooling. But after a few years, each of us has driven so many cars that, even if we don't notice wearing mismatched socks three days a week, we're hyper sensitive to the most minuscule automotive missteps— as well as the quiet touches of good design. But for the Supra before you, Toyota not only asked, they listened. Two years ago, Toyota's product-planning staff assembled batches of magazine folks, me included, buckled us into every significant sports car then available, from the Porsche 944 to the Acura NSX, and then picked our brains with a scalpel. What is a sports car. What makes it fun or romantic, good-looking, sensitive to the palms of your hands and balls of your feet. Pulling through the gates of Atlanta Motor Speedway, nerve center for the Supra's introduction, I was wedged into a bus loaded with car-magazine writers, a couple of whom had also been part of Toyota's research panels. In a few minutes would I be sitting tall because my two cents worth two years ago helped make a great car, or would I be. Source: www.roadandtrack.com
