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Ae86 jdm steering wheel8/28/2023 ![]() ![]() When we’d agreed to the no drifting request I had advised Toyota GB that if the roads were wet there would almost inevitably be oversteer, purely for the camera, of course. Together these may have tickled up the horsepower a little, but not dramatically, and not nearly as much as they’ve raised expectations. It has a Janspeed four-into-one tubular manifold and stainless steel exhaust, plus an Apexi induction kit. In truth, it’s the period modifications fitted to this car that are probably over-selling the performance. It sounds like 200bhp but doesn’t go like it. But when you come to ask for real action, for an overtake, say, and you pin the throttle at ‘only’ 3500rpm or so, there’s not much response. Give the throttle a moderate push and there’s an encouraging bark from the engine and a nice kick, so initially it feels like the little coupe will manage OK, even though there’s just 107lb ft, delivered at a heady, your-call-is-important-to-us 5200rpm. Yet, although the Corolla is a featherweight – at 970kg it’s 133kg lighter than the new Alpine A110 – the engine is also very light on torque by today’s standards. And before the end of ’87 the AE86 would be another rear-drive coupe with a great future behind it.īy the standards of the mid-’80s, the 16-valve engine boasted a decent bhp-per-litre output, Toyota extracting 123bhp at 6600rpm from the 1587cc in-line four. At that time the affordable rear-drive coupe breed had made it onto the list of endangered species production of the pretty Alfa GTV was coming to an end, Ford was shifting the last Capris with special run-out models such as the Brooklands, and the Isuzu Piazza, newest of them all, felt clunky even after a fettling by Lotus and wasn’t long for the new car price lists. I just missed out on driving one when it was new, joining Motor magazine in 1987. The chances of either of those things being true seems quite slim.Įven though I’m old enough to appear in the fossil records of motoring journalists, up to this point I had never driven an AE86. Maybe when I hand the Corolla back I won’t have cornered it, at length, looking through the side windows. Seriously? Maybe when the student Bill Clinton was handed a spliff at college he really didn’t inhale. Such is its reputation, I was surprised that when I looked again an hour later it wasn’t sideways, nose in the privet and its arse hanging over into next door’s. We assured them we wouldn’t be hanging out on the lock-stops with smoke wreathing off the rear tyres, and a couple of weeks later the light metallic blue AE86 was sitting on my driveway, looking fantastic. This Corolla was loaned to us from the Toyota GB heritage fleet on the understanding that we wouldn’t drift it. ![]()
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