Celica Supra History and Basics

The Celica Supra is a 2 door, rear wheel drive grand touring car spawned off the Celica platform in 1978. In 1986.5 the third generation was released and it went it's separate ways from the now front wheel drive Celica, and was only known as Supra. This blog focuses entirely on the second generation chassis, the MA60, or more commonly referred to by North Americans, as the "mark two".

The name Celica Supra is latin based meaning "to surpass the heavens/stars". Toyota was big into mythology with naming and badging of their cars in the 1970s and 1980s. The early Celica emblem appeared to be that of a dragon, or dragon-masted viking ship.

The Celica Supra used a more streamlined, modern version of this dragon/ship on it's nose badge and b-pillars.

Unlike their rival, the Datsun/Nissan Z cars, the Supra retained it's inline 6 cylinder engine throughout all generations. Starting off with the 2.6 liter 4M-E in the US, the M engine ran from 1978 until 1992 in various configurations. The very same M block that was born of the legendary 2000GT sports car. In 1982, Yamaha designed another head for Toyota to land in the second generation Supra for the 2.8 liter 5MGE engine.

Supra won Motor Trend's Car of the Year it's very first year released, beating out Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Datsun, among others. It did consistently well in maganzine road tests for it's time until it started to be outdated and outrun by cars with turbo engines (300zx, Starion)