A yen for a sports car

Rare, stylish and exquisitely engineered, the Toyota 2000GT revolutionised Japan's motor industry and charmed

- Robert Coucher 

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it's said, and for decades the Japanese car industry has been dismissed as a copy-and-paste operation incapable of original thought. After World War Two, Japan became known for building reliable but dull cars such as the Toyota Corona and Nissan Bluebird. Hardly inspiring. But with international expansion taking off in the early 1960s, Japanese car-makers began to notice that leading European and American manufacturers were developing 'halo' cars to burnish their images. Think Mercedes Gullwing, Chevy Corvette or Jaguar E-type. So in 1965 the Japanese set about creating their very own halo automobile: the Toyota 2000GT.

A team just five strong was carefully selected to work with Yamaha and undertake Project 280A under Toyota's lead engineer Jiro Kawano, including stylist Saturo Nozaki. Among a number of sports cars Toyota had purchased to study were an E-type, MGB, Triumph TR2, Porsche 911 and Lotus Elan. Before all this, Yamaha had started the development of a sports car for Nissan, only for the project to fizzle out. But Toyota was waiting in the wings and gave the Yamaha engineers the green light with the 2000GT.

Having looked at and learnt from the competition, Kawano's team plumped for a Lotus Elan-type backbone chassis and fully independent suspension, with stylist Nozaki taking inspiration from Jaguar's beautiful E-type. And this is where the Japanese engineers proved to be so clever: having studied the best on offer, they harnessed the results to their own advantage. Not so much imitation as further development - take Colin Chapman's racing-carinspired suspension, team it with Sir William Lyons' breathtaking styling, and add Yamaha's beautiful little double-overhead-cam six-cylinder engine.