Just like the Z33 featured last week, the Toyota 86 is a front engine, rear drive, two door sports car in a lineup that has faster two door sports cars. Unlike the Z however, the 86's place in its company is very clear, being the lightweight, low powered, fun to drive, pure and simplistic sports car of its family tree, and one I much prefer over its more expensive sibling. That said, the 86's role in the Toyota family is much more evident in the context of this e–sports focused title, Gran Turismo Sport, being the sole representative of Toyota in Gr.4 events owing to the elusive Supra Gr.4's unavailability in FIA events.
In fact, even among the 28–strong list of Gr.4 cars in this game, the 86 Gr.4 stands out. Unlike its low effort fictional brethren that sports featureless interiors and generic race displays, the 86 Gr.4 instead lifts its interior from the #166 Toyota GAZOO Racing TOYOTA 86 that raced in the SP3 class of the 2012 24 Hours of Nürburgring, a car that has appeared in Gran Turismo 6. Sporting a colourful red bucket seat, the road car's original tach, Gazoo Racing steering wheel, fully functional gauge clusters that display pressures and temperatures, and even a 6 speed stick shifter as opposed to paddle shifters on the steering column, the 86 Gr.4 has a very strong and authentic presence in any setting that sets it apart from the barely inspired fictional Gr.4 competition, be it simply sitting in a garage or lining up on a grid.
On the track, the 86 Gr.4 stays true to the calling of the road car on which it's based; featherweight, agile, gentle on tyres and fuel, easy to toss around, but utterly lacking in straight line pace. Making 358HP (266kW) from its 2L Boxer 4 without the aid of forced induction before BoP takes its 1% cut, the powerband of the 86 Gr.4 is smooth and linear, making peak power just 1,000rpm before its 8,000rpm redline. However, this also means that short shifting to save fuel costs the car a lot of its grunt, and it's totally hopeless from a standing start, being totally unable to spin any racing slick tyres in the dry. So gutless is it in fact, it completely falls flat once pulled out of a fellow 86's slipstream, aligning their speeds together without first putting the nose of the chasing car past the rear fender of the leading car. Overtaking another identically specced 86 in a one make race is difficult enough a task as a result, let alone another Gr.4 car—It gets out launched and out dragged by a Cayman GT4 with BoP applied. That... might have been the single most heinous thing I've ever written in a review, despite meaning no malice.
But of course, no one drives an 86 expecting to crush the competition with raw power; they expect a lightweight, corner craving, cooperative steed that will let them out dance their opponents in a dramatic show of skill and tyre smoke backed by Eurobeat and badly drawn 2D women. To this end, the 86 Gr.4 largely delivers, being so natural and easy in the corners, I rarely had to fight the car to force it into doing more of something it wasn't doing enough, or correct it from doing something I didn't expect. It was so just so neutral, natural, and agile, it felt like the car could read my mind at times. The last four turns of Tokyo South Inner Loop, the right–left–right–left into the main straight, felt less like maneuvering a 1,200kg (2,646lbs) hunk of metal through a series of bends and more like simply being one with the water of a river gently flowing around the rocks in its way; it barely felt like it was something I had to actively affect at all. Any hyperbole or cliché in the book you can hurl at the 86 Gr.4, it will live up to it and then some. In fact, here's one more hyperbole to throw into the pile: Tackling corners in the 86 Gr.4 is simply effortless.
...way too much so for its own good.
Remember that part about "smoke"? This is where that comes in; for some reason I can't fathom, the steering feel of the 86 Gr.4 is uncannily light, almost as if something was broken in my Logitech G29, and I even had to jump ship to my Cayman GT4 just to make sure it wasn't a hardware issue on my end. I usually try to refrain from commenting on steering feel in my reviews because the Force Feedback in the Gran Turismo series has always been notoriously lacking, but the 86's steering feel is decidedly off even in the context of Gran Turismo, almost as if someone forgot to program it for the 86 Gr.4. As I said before, the 86 corners effortlessly, but a large part of that might be down to how light the steering wheel is. As a consequence, there is nearly no feel, no feedback at all from the steering wheel when driving the 86 Gr.4 at the limit. I never know what the tyres are doing when push finally comes to shove, or if they are even in contact with the road when going over crests of hills or bumps and rumble strips, which has led me to explore alternative offroad routes in every paved racing circuit I brought my 86 to, even the ones I'm intimately familiar with like Bathurst. Driving an 86 Gr.4 feels almost like meeting a romantic partner on a blind date, with whom I share amazing chemistry and get along super well with, only for them to completely ghost me at the altar come wedding day. It's utterly bizarre and downright disgusting how quickly it earns the trust of its driver, egging them to trash it harder, only to completely go limp on them at the worst of times when we need that communication the most.
I know Igor Fraga might prove the following statement I'm about to make wrong at any given moment, but I genuinely think the 86 Gr.4 is WAY too slow to make any sort of impression in a field of Gr.4 cars, especially if tyres and fuel aren't an issue in the race. Simply as a plaything, the obscene lack of steering feel immediately makes it an awful car despite its sharp and otherwise intuitive handling. I genuinely think that it'd be a strong contender for the title of "Driving Nirvana" in my head, currently held by the Cayman GT4 Clubsport, if the steering feel were to be fixed. For friends who have followed this thread for years, they'd know just how deeply I love my Cayman GT4 CS, and in turn, how high a praise that would've been. For now, I'd much rather drive the Supra Gr.4 if I for some odd reason need to drive a Toyota Gr.4 car, because much like the 86, it's a well balanced, corner craving handling machine with no straight line grunt. Last I checked, the Supra Gr.4 actually has steering feel too. Funny how Toyota is blessed with having two cars in the spartan Gr.4 category, and they're both set up to have the exact same strengths and weaknesses. Baffling.
Toyota GR Supra Nur24h 2019 #90 by yn221 livery link (GTS)
Team Gazoo Racing by seshibon1640 livery link (GTS)
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