Have you seen our latest episode, where Marty and MOOG are battling the cheapest new car on Aussie soil against a piece of Aussie car royalty? Well, if you haven't CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE SHENANIGANS!
While plenty of people know Toyota Camrys as basic pedestrian transport, not many know these mid-90s "wide-body" Camrys had a serious piece of motorsport heritage on the table in parts of the world, including Great Britain (England and the United Kingdom), New Zealand, and Australia.
The curvaceous third-generation (XV10) Camry hit the world in 1991 and... well, while they were well-built and (in 138kW 3VZ-FE V6 form) had plenty of poke, they weren't what you'd call an engaging drive. Still, the base engineering beneath these four-door family sleds should be appreciated and this certainly happened in other parts of the globe, like the United Kingdom.
Japan had the smaller V30-platform Camry while international markets scored a larger XV10 "wide body" model which pushed the Camry platform firmly into the burgeoning front-wheel-drive family car market. Packing a heady 97kW the Aussie 2.2-litre four-cylinder 5S-FE-powered Camry was no tar-burner but it got people where they needed to go efficiently and with ridiculous reliability.
Over in Old Blighty (so named for their amazing weather) they had a Toyota motorsport division known as TOM'S GB which was saucing up all manner of nonsense, including 4-cylinder Camrys. Now, these weren't the same two-litre four-banger engines used in the Group A Celicas running rampant in the World Rally Championship (3SGTE); these had to run naturally aspirated, but were allowed to be high-compression, high-RPM circuit-tuned beasts that had nothing in common with the Toyota Camrys sold every day out of dealerships the world 'round.
Packing dry sump lubrication, high-lift camshafts, mega compression ratios, standalone ECUs and a million other modications there were no production Camrys making near 300hp like these beasts and none of them had a sequential transmission like these brutes. And, while they had plenty of Toyota UK smarts they were put together by Dave Cook Racing in South Africa.
Yes, I said "them" as there were several built over the years. And they hit Australia in 1997 as part of the 2-litre "Super Touring" car category that was in fierce competition with the 5-litre V8 touring car formula.
We had Audi, BMW, Ford, Hyundai, Peugeot, Volvo, Honda, Alfa Romeo, Renault, and Toyota all racing in similar, 300hp FWD machinery. These cars had the variety sorely missing from the 5L V8 category (Ford vs Holden, yay!) but what it missed was the powersliding lunacy and door-banging action that made the V8s a breathtaking spectacle.
In Europe and the UK the 2L category was a barnstormer with some of the most-intense touring car racing seen since the early 1960s, but Australia missed out on much of that action as we were too far away from the cash-rich factory teams and big-name European drivers.
Aussies saw 2 of these mega-Camrys run in the Super Touring class in the late 1990s, with Phoenix Motorsport importing the white multi-colour car for Mark Adderton in 1997, followed by the blue Minolta camera-sponsored blue machine that ran in 2000-2001 (also built by Dave Cook in South Africa).
Ultimately, after the Super Tourer vs V8 war was decided in favour of the pushrod-powered locals, many of the exotic Super Tourers were sold off overseas as they were simply too expensive to run as weekend track toys. The cost of servicing the engines and transmissions in some of these cars ran to hundreds-of-thousands of dollars per-year!
