Gary Jarman is in the rare position of having owned two Supras: the Mk4 in the picture and a Mk5 that he bought in 2019 and ran for two years. How do they compare?
“The Mk5 was fast and it handled really well but it just felt like a German car, where the Mk4 is a big Japanese GT,” he says. “The Mk5’s cabin just looked straight out of a BMW. I know the Mk4’s wasn’t pretty but it sat well with the rest of the car. It was a Toyota cabin. The Mk5 Supra was a Toyota on the outside, but inside it looked like a BMW.”
It’s no exaggeration to say Gary is extremely attached to his 3.0-litre twin-turbo automatic Mk4 Supra. He bought it in 1996 when it was one year old and paid £39,000 – a saving of around £4000 on the model’s new price. It had done 9000 miles. Today, 28 years later, it’s showing 160,000.
“My daughter was a year old when I got it and we’d carry her around in the back,” he recalls. “Meanwhile, during the week, it was taking me to London and back and racking up the miles. It never let me down.”
Gary was attracted to the model by its wraparound dash, active front spoiler (it deploys above 60mph) and limited-slip diff, not to mention its performance. In Japan, the straight-six engine was capped at 276bhp, but for Europe the Supra’s output was raised to 321bhp.
“I had my car put on a dyno recently and after 160,000 miles the engine’s still producing 321bhp,” he says. It’s an official UK car, of course, and not one of the many grey imports that followed. That means it’s rare since, by the time UK sales ended in 1996, Toyota UK had sold just 600 Mk4s – a mix of four-speed autos and six-speed manuals.
Many grey-import Supras have been blinged, chipped and uprated but Jarman is determined to keep his UK car exactly as it was first sold by Toyota.
It’s why, when its digital clock broke, he didn’t just replace it with the one fitted to Japan-spec Supras but scoured the internet for the European-spec timer that incorporates a temperature display, eventually finding one for £300 on eBay.
And why, to get it through its last MOT, he fitted new Toyo tyres that he will change for the Michelins originally specified for the model, just as soon as the tyre company begins remanufacturing them in a few weeks’ time. “I’m fussy,” he says.
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