As a proud new owner of a 2014 GT86 (see my car here: https://motorsportformentalhealth.com/2023/09/18/my-new-to-me-gt86/) I thought it might be fun to have a look through the cars of the 86 lineage at SEMA.
The story with the ‘Sprinter Trueno’ line of Corollas. Sprinter Trueno was the high performance model of the Corolla beginning with the TE27 Corolla in 1972 and finishing with the AE111 in 2000.
The car of note in this range though was the AE86 produced from 1983 to 1987. It was sold as part of the E80 generation of Corolla but had the E70s rear wheel drive chassis. They were a small, light car and the higher spec cars had a 1.6 twin cam fast revving engine and limited slip differential.
They were hugely popular in motorsport in touring cars, rallying and most notably early drifting.
One really notable video series of the 86 is Pluspy, in which Keiichi Tsuchiya slides his 86 through rural passes in the mountains of Japan. You can see the full film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di_X8IQLlAw
I could only find one AE86 this SEMA show. If I missed any please let me know!
The GT86 came along in 2012 which was inspired by the original AE86.
The GT86 was a collaboration between Toyota and Subaru. It was a lightweight, rear wheel driven sports car with a low mounted Subaru 2.0ltr flat four engine, a six speed gearbox (either manual or paddle shift) and a limited slip differential powering the rear wheels.
It was named the 86 in Asia and Australia, the GT86 in Europe and New Zealand and the United States and Canada got the car under the now defunct Scion brand as the FRS. In Jamaica and Nicaragua the car is sold as the FT-86 which was the name of the concept car.
Subaru marketed the car as the BRZ. There are trim differences between the BRZ and the rest of the 86 range and I think the BRZ is a bit rarer.
There were only a couple of the original GT86. Interestingly all 3 cars were wearing the Street Hunter wide body kit. Rumour has it that they will be doing this body kit but withe the standard arches in the future. I assume that will include the different bumpers, skirts and the ducktail spoiler.
The headers and the quality of fabrication on this car were absolutely mind blowing. It was such an incredible build! The V8 looks very much at home in there!
The GR86 (Gazoo Racing 86) is sort of the evolution of the GT86. It’s had a significant face lift and the engine size was bumped up from 2.0 to 2.4, giving it a little boost in power.
As this is the car that’s currently in production, there were a lot of of them in the show! Toyota themselves had a couple on their stand.
You can read more about the manufacturer’s booths at SEMA here: https://motorsportformentalhealth.com/2023/11/17/sema-2023-manufacturers/
Larry Chen’s car was on the Toyota stand last year. It was nice to see this again!
This is Jaydn Crews BRZ with (I believe) a Liberty Walk kit.
There was an 86 in the Toyo Treadpass. You can read about the rest of the Treadpass here: https://motorsportformentalhealth.com/2023/11/11/sema-2023-toyo-tires-treadpass/
Nate Hamilton’s new drift car. Again, you can read all about the drift cars I saw at SEMA here: https://motorsportformentalhealth.com/2023/11/15/sema-2023-drift-cars/
The Scalar Performance fully electric GR86. The drive train is by a company called Hypercraft, who I will be covering in a bit of depth in my EV & Future Propulsion article when I get around to writing it.
Finally lets have a bit of a image dump of the rest of the GR86s.
Thanks for reading!
I still have a lot of SEMA content coming up. I’m bound to have some tutorials coming out from my 86 in the new year too! If you would like to stay up to date with all my blog posts please subscribe to the blog via email (from the box at the bottom of the page).
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By Richard Francis
