Toyota GR Supra Manual

The headline news is the offer of a manual gearbox, but that might actually be a distraction. Read beyond the opening paragraph or two and you realise there’s something more significant afoot, something that does even more than a stick and three pedals to turn the slightly underwhelming Toyota GR Supra into a seriously appealing sports coupé.

I first drove the fifth-generation Supra three years ago when it was launched to the motoring press in Spain. I’ve tried several others since on familiar roads – a six-cylinder car, a base-model four-pot variant, even a tuned one – and I’ve never found my stony feelings towards the Supra have softened one bit. For me, Toyota’s riposte to the Porsche 718 Cayman was always short on character and lacking in driver appeal.