(test "render" in Gran Turismo 5 using the Toyota 86 GT)
I've been lurking FT86Club for a loooooong time, so this is long overdue. I'm about to receive what could officially be the 87th Scion FR-S in North America (I put in a reserve back in May 2011, when the first spy photos of the FT-86 Nurburgring mule hit the web). At this point, it's 3 weeks 5 days to June 1st, so I'm finally closing in on taking delivery of a Scion FR-S in Raven. This is a special story on how a childhood dream is being fulfilled, so I'll start from the beginning.
When I was a kid in the mid-80's, I was interested in cars, but I arguably grew up right. Both my parents drove manual transmission cars; my dad had various pickup trucks, but my mom had a 1980 TE71 Corolla liftback (or was it TE72? I need a Toyota chassis/engine code nerd to help me on the difference between the 1 and the 2 there; either way, it's the one with the long sloping liftback and the triangular rear windows). That was a fun car, with the sunroof and the manual transmission, but I almost never got to sit in the front seat, since I was 7 years old when we had to get rid of it due to rust and other maintenance costs of that era. However, my neighbor had an AE86 Corolla SR5 notchback. That car was even MORE awesome, in my mind, with the popup headlights and the sporty boxy look. This was before I even knew about the AE86's motorsports prowess, or of Initial D. When I later did find out about Initial D in the mid-2000's, I said, "Hey, I know that car! That car's awesome! Wow!"
In 2006, I bought a Scion tC to replace a 1999 Corolla, which had been a nice car, but I wanted something with a little more power, and a little more fun. I had rented a 2006 Camry SE with the 2AZ 4-cylinder engine, and that was very nice compared to the Corolla, though I wished it had a manual transmission, a little less weight, and perhaps 2 doors. On recommendations from friends, I took a test drive of the tC. All those pleasant memories of the TE71 Corolla liftback came back, but this time, I was in the driver's seat! Over the past 6 years, I had gotten into car mods, including changing my own instrument cluster LEDs to red, getting all kinds of suspension mods installed, and going crazy with gauges. I'm still driving the tC, which I painted IS300 yellow in 2010, prior to the 2nd-gen tC RS 7.0 coming out in yellow (which I was very happy to see).
I later got into autocross in 2009, which let me safely explore the dynamics of taking curves fast on a closed course. After a number of runs, though, it became obvious that I wanted to get a rear-wheel-drive car, to explore oversteer. Prior to autocross, when I was starting to think about the next car in mid-2009, I thought of the "what would your next car be?" question that one usually has. At the time, there wasn't much that was affordable, and I didn't want to get anything used (in case it needed heavy repairs, or had unrepairable issues), and I wanted a lighter car with back seats (even if humans couldn't sit in them), and I did not want a convertible. That pretty much narrowed the field down to the RX-8 or the BMW 1 series. I didn't like the fuel economy of rotary engines, and later when I drove an RX-8, I didn't like how there was little torque until about 7000 RPM. And BMW was just too high-rent, and most CPO cars probably would've been pretty expensive, and wouldn't have had manual transmission if they came off of a lease.
But looming way in the background was the "Toyobaru Coupe" project, uncovered in spring 2008 with the leaks of the first sketches. Back then, I was thinking about prior Toyota 4-cylinder sporty cars, and the legacy of high-revving engines. The 2ZZ-GE engine in the 7th-gen Celica GT-S, which was also being used in the Lotus Elise. The 3S-GTE in three generations of Celica, and the 2nd-gen MR2. And of course the 4A-GE in the AE86 Corolla and the AW11 MR2. In the late-2000's, Toyota's smaller 4-cylinder engines didn't have anywhere near as much power to make today's 3000-pound cars go fast, and the 2AZ was a nice torquey engine that just felt right in the tC, but had a power curve that fell off at 5500 RPM. At that time, Subaru was tearing it up with the EJ20 turbocharged boxer revving to about 7000 RPM, so that looked like a good engine platform to build on. As the years went on, more details came out, with news of D4-S direct injection to get more power, instead of turbocharging. But probably my favorite representation was the drivable FT-86 Concept in Gran Turismo 5. I drove that thing a lot, and loved how it felt oddly stable while drifting in Clubman Stage Route 5. As more details about the FT-86 production model were coming out, I dialed expectations down a bit, and asked myself, "Would I be happy with these stats?" To which I said, "Hell yes, I would; it's the modern hachi-roku!"
Keep in mind that I had committed to the purchase once the Nurburgring mule pictures leaked out. I stared at them, looked at the body lines, saw the video of it driving by, and said, "This looks like it could be a real production car." I put in a reserve right there with Ted at Wellesley Scion.
Once the production model details started leaking out, I loved what I was seeing. The body lines seemed to mesh so well; far better than the FT-86 Concept, and kept much of the appealing lines of the FT-86 II concept. The power numbers and approximate weight figures came out, so I fired up GT5 and fed in power limiter and ballast into the FT-86 Concept, and said, "Yeah, I'd be okay with this!" The release event happened in November, and GT5 offered the Toyota 86 for free, which I proceeded to drive for hours. I watched the press review events scroll by, with my favorite being the "Chris Harris on Cars" video of driving the GT 86 at Jarama Circuit. Even the engine note seems like an homage to the 4A-GE.
So at this point I'm getting really close to picking up the car. Since the launch event, I've been counting down the approximate months, then weeks, and now... well, still weeks, because I don't know what day, and a single digit number of weeks sounds more optimistic than a double-digit number of days.
After painting the tC yellow, I codenamed it "Sunrise". The codename for this project is "Yozora" (Japanese for "night sky"), and is derived from these things:
- the song "Hiroyuki Oda - Yozora" from the Japanese trance label Otographic:
http://www.otographicmusic.com/?p=2078&lang=en (which I fed into GT5 and played during drifting sessions with the FT-86 Concept)
- the theme of the "night sky giving magical power" in the video game Bayonetta (the car is going to be themed after Bayonetta: black exterior, gold wheels, red trim)
- the first word of the intro cinematic in the Japanese version of the video game Catherine (first time I heard that, I said, "Wait, I know that word! What does it mean?... oh.")
Obviously, more details to follow in the next few weeks.