Rorty & nice: Toyota GR86 review

It’s small, spirited, rear-wheel drive - and cheap. The GR86 brilliantly captures the essence of a sports car. Bravo, Toyota.

On the track: the Toyota GR86

On a cold, grey Sunday afternoon recently I lit a fire and decided to watch Battle of Britain again. A man can never have too much of Olivier’s miserableness or Robert Shaw’s jumper.

And could there be a better man-car pairing than Christopher Plummer as the dashing Spitfire pilot and his little MG PA sports car? Kenneth More used an MG too in Reach for the Sky, as did the man about whom the film was made, Douglas Bader. It was what young men did before the invention of quiche lorraine and weird pronouns. Drove sports cars. Because these little cars with their rorty engines and their chromed wheels sent out a clear message: “I have no need for practicality in my life. I am single and I’m carefree and I like the wind in my hair.”

I’m not sure when the allure of the sports car began to wane. It’s not a drive to be green. People ­realise electric vehicles aren’t as green as they’re made out to be, that they are phenomenally expensive to buy and increasingly expensive to reinvigorate, assuming of course you can find a charging location. Which, as there’s only one for every 30 electric vehicles on the road, is unlikely. And nor is it increasingly draconian rules about the height a bonnet should be. No. It’s a general malaise. A sense that driving can’t be fun because there are too many cameras and too many rules and too many cycle lanes. And that if it can’t be fun, you may as well drive around in what’s nothing more than a household appliance. Something with a small, economical engine and good internet connectivity for when you’re stuck in traffic.

When it comes to affordable sports cars, there’s the Mazda MX-5. And that’s it. The Fiat’s gone. Renault doesn’t do one any more. No one does. Not even MG, which now makes... God knows what? Nothing I’d want to buy.

All of which brings me to the Toyota GR86. It’s not a sports car as such because it has a roof. But it is small, it does have a rorty engine and rear-wheel drive, and it is cheap. Amazingly cheap. You can have this car for just over $43,000.

I doubt you’ll remember its predecessor, the GT86. Launched as a sister car to the Subaru BRZ, which you also won’t remember, the idea, on paper, was quite good. Fit a little car with rear-wheel drive, equip it with not very grippy tyres from a Prius and, wahey, all over the world young men would be introduced for the very first time to their inner Plummer.

Road testers such as myself loved it but we didn’t buy one. No one did. Toyota, however, weren’t to be deterred and decided the problem was the engine. They reckoned it wasn’t torquey enough. So now they’ve addressed that and the little sports coupe is back. As the GR86.

The engine is still a flat four - which gives the car a low centre of gravity - but it now displaces 2.4 ­litres. Which means more power, more importantly, an extra 33Nm of torque, which comes at you from the ground up, not from the stratospheric red zone. This means you no longer have to stir the gearlever like you’re beating eggs as you desperately search for a bit of grunt. The engine is now tremendous. Even in top gear at 60km/h you can feel the low-down surge as if you’re caught in a rip.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a Porsche or a Ferrari. It won’t tear your hair off but it will do 0 to 100km/h in about six seconds, and that’s fine. So is the handling. ­Toyota has realised that most ­people don’t actually want to slide their car round roundabouts – it frightens them and they end up in court. So now the car has tyres that are designed to grip the road rather than slither about on it as though they’re made from Fairy Liquid.

I truly loved driving this car, and I loved the noise it made too, until I discovered it was an artificial sound coming at me through the speakers. Then I hated it.

This is a trivial thing, though. The GR86 is extremely pretty, ­effortless to get in and out of, and the interior comes with just enough stuff to make you think nothing is missing at all. It’s an ­extremely complete little car, and if you hanker after the olden days you should definitely buy one.

I was going to end up by saying Toyota also makes the Yaris GR, which is even more fun, and you could have one of those instead. But I’ve just made a couple of calls and it seems they’ve sold out of those. Prius, anyone?