The BMW M2 and Toyota GR Supra made for an interesting drag race. Picture: Jaco van der Merwe
Lining up the BMW M2 against the Toyota GR Supra on the drag strip isn’t exactly comparing apples with apples. But it’s not every day that The Citizen Motoring samples two such special cars in the same week.
The end result might not be pure apple juice, but it was definitely an interesting fruity concoction.
Both the BMW M2 and the Toyota GR Supra are rear-wheel driven cars and the two we pitted against each other both featured automatic transmission.
Road Test Editor Mark Jones was so impressed when he drove the BMW M2 at its national launch in October, that he wrote “best you enjoy moments like these because they are going to disappear into an artificially intelligent and electrified world”.
What he liked was the fact that BMW stayed away from electrification with the 3.0-litre straight-six turbocharged petrol engine. This mean mill produces 338 kW of power and 550 Nm of torque.
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BMW claims that the M2 will sprint from 0 to 100 km/h in 4.1 seconds. But the German carmaker was actually being very modest with this time. Because Mark managed to get a best 0-100 km/h run of 3.86 seconds during his high-performance test at Gerotek.
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The GR Supra had some work to do to beat the Beemer.
The Supra was the first of Toyota’s GR family, which has since grown to four with the inclusion of the Yaris, 86 and Corolla.
Launched only in automatic guise in 2019, Toyota has recently added a manual version as part of a midcycle update. The update also included a 35 kW power bump, with the 3.0-litre straight-six turbo petrol engine now producing 285 kW. Torque went up from 450 to 500 Nm.
Mark has already taken the manual Supra to Gerotek. He managed to clock a 0-100 km/h sprint time of 4.56 seconds, slightly more than the claimed 4.4 seconds.
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With Toyota claiming the automatic will do it in 4.1 seconds, Mark was keen to see how close he could get to this. And to the M2 of course.
Very disappointingly, the best the Toyota could manage was a 4.44-second sprint. More than half a second slower than the M2, the GR Supra got a proper hiding.
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