Unless you can prove otherwise, Keith and Adam Carr have put together the most powerful and fastest Toyota Supra Mark III the UK's ever seen. It recorded 571 bhp at just 1 bar of boost on its first trip to Santa Pod dragstrip and notched up an impressive 13.1-second quarter-mile time at 113 mph. That's without the help of nitrous oxide and remaining within road-legal spec.
"We pulled up, let some air out of the tires, changed the induction pipe, removed the silencer and then started our runs," Adam says. Nine runs later, without any problems other than excessive wheelspin, they posted multiple low 13-second times. Adam described a typical run: "I dropped the clutch at 4,000 rpm and then tried to feed it in to keep the wheels from spinning. We've got all the power but we just can't use it. We were crossing the finish line at 7,000 rpm in third." Experienced drag racers advised them to switch to smaller wheels with proper drag slicks, which would ultimately lead to low 12s with little trouble. More suitable wheels and tires were ordered upon arriving home.
Prior to the Supra appearing in the Carr's garage, neither had ever owned a Japanese car, never mind a modified one, or even competed on a dragstrip. So why now? "It was the look mainly-that old-school thing," Keith explained. "We went to look at a few but they were only in average condition. We just wanted a Mark III Turbo-I've always loved big engines and this came from a local garage for 3,000."
Then Adam and Keith paid their first trip to Santa Pod. The rest is history. Immediately, they were hooked on the quarter-mile drug and realized the potential their Supra just might have. The Supra was soon taken off the road for performance modifications.
"We thought, 'great, now we can do a bit of tuning' but it went a bit too far," he remembers with a grin. That's an understatement. Originally the plan was to simply convert the Toyota into a fast road car, suitable for weekends at the dragstrip, but it has since become nothing short of a dedicated drag car, albeit road legal, although not the sort of road legal a commuter would want to take for more than a few roundabouts. "First, we planned to just work on the head but when we removed it, it wasn't that worn so we decided to take the whole engine out and go the whole hog," Keith says. "We bought some mild tuning parts and then thought, 'let's go all the way,' so they were never even fitted."
Adam hung out on Internet forums, discussing specs with fellow Mark III owners and experts and then ordered parts, often from the US. Adam remembers receiving packages almost daily at one point. The bills were quickly mounting up, and that was despite Adam and Keith supplying the labor. The brothers reckon to build a car of similar specifications would cost in the neighborhood of 25,000, and that's just for parts. "The GT45 turbo cost 450 and came from a Supra, which was making 930 bhp-it's a hybrid one," Adam says. Getting the head ported and polished is the only part of the project the Carrs didn't do themselves-apart from the tuning. The labor alone for the head was 1,000. "They did an incredible job," Adam says.