SEMA 2021: Toyota showcases 500bhp Supra Top and Supra Heritage Editions

Turns out, you can’t just easily chop the new Toyota Supra’s roof off to create a MkIV-inspired targa. Who knew.

Debuting the Supra Sport Top at this year’s SEMA show – following an online reveal back in January – Toyota has detailed some of the work that went into creating a car that references one of the Nineties’ most iconic Japanese sports cars.

“The steel was a little harder to cut through than we expected,” explains KC Mathieu, owner of the shop in Texas that performed the surgery. “We started with an air saw and got nowhere real fast.”

Apparently, after 30 minutes the team had only cut through one inch of steel. So they went back to the drawing board, fished out a New Better Tool, and et voila, ‘the roof really started to yield’.

Once the roof was cut, Toyota 3D-printed a pair of composite panels, contoured to the Supra’s lines, while retaining the outer roof body structure shapes (these in turn were reinforced).

Elsewhere, the hand-built rear diffuser and underbody airflow were tweaked over the Heritage Edition car (that’s the red one, first revealed back in 2019), there’s a new exhaust, and the MkIV’s ‘basket handle’ rear wing.

Both share the same performance upgrades, one of which is startling. The turbo was modified to produce 18 per cent better airflow to the BMW-sourced straight-six, along with a new ECU, bespoke intake and that exhaust. Power, therefore, rises from 340bhp to a really quite healthy 500bhp.

There are bigger brakes and adjustable coilovers to complement the performance upgrades, and the petition to get these as production models begins here. Yeah, we're gonna need a bigger saw.