Poker harder than fry
You’d think the trickiest part of replacing an automatic with a manual is the transmission itself. That was certainly not an easy job with the Toyota Supra. The transmission does not exist at BMW, which does supply the engine for the Supra and, in the case of the variant with automatic transmission, also the transmission.
So Toyota had to screw together a manual gearbox with a little help from automatic transmission manufacturer ZF. That’s not even the most complicated part, because that’s the poker itself. Because the Supra (and the BMW Z4 with which it shares its technology) were never destined to get a manual gearbox, the center tunnel is not designed for it.
Knuckles against air conditioner panel
When the Japanese exchanged the gear lever of the automatic transmission for the gear lever of the manual gearbox, they found out that when you put in the 1, 3, 5 and R you hit the air conditioning panel with your knuckles. So that air conditioning panel had to be moved forward. But then there was still not enough room to move the lever to the left and right. Therefore, the buttons of the driving modes, safety systems and the entire iDrive controller also had to move a bit ‘just’. Thus, in fact, the entire center tunnel was overhauled.
Gear knob of 200 grams
Toyota then had to find the right gear knob, because a few grams more or less makes a lot of difference to the feeling when shifting. In the end, a 200-gram shift knob proved to be just the right compromise between convenience and mass inertia. And all this for a version that is not even expected to account for the majority of sales. No more saying that Toyota is a boring company and that accountants run the place …
In this video you can see how the Toyota Supra drives with a manual gearbox.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl