Less is Everything

Lightness, balance, focus, and style: Scion creates a sports car for purists.
By Bill Heald

We can certainly point to times in life when more mass is better, such as when you’re selecting a pile of gold bricks, a defensive lineman, or a juicy T-bone steak. But if you want a supermodel, a backpack, or a true sports car (and by the latter I mean a potent machine that can carve up a twistladen mountain road like a defensive lineman attacking a T-bone steak), you want something trim that’s light on its feet.

With the exception of a certain Lexus supercar you’ve seen on these pages, Toyota has not had a real sports machine in its stable for quite a while. The hot new coupe you see here is not only phenomenally feathery in weight and deliciously distinctive in form, it also has a unique lineage. The FR-S (Front-engine, Rear-wheel-drive, Sport) finds itself in Toyota’s youth-focused Scion division because the company is paying homage to its enthusiast street-racer roots where less really is more. The sports car is “most inspired by the AE86 generation of the Corolla, better known as the Hachi-Roku, meaning ‘8-6’ in Japanese,” explains a Scion spokesman. “[The] front-engine, rear-wheel-drive coupe was lightweight and well balanced, making it a solid choice for driving enthusiasts.”

The FR-S concept was revealed last year to tantalize the performance crowd, and the production version is remarkably faithful to the designer’s ideal. In a first for Toyota, the car was codeveloped with Subaru (Toyota owns about 17 percent of Subaru), and the relationship becomes clear when you look at the hard parts of the car. The heart and soul of the FR-S is its 100 horsepower-per-liter flat-four Boxer engine, which is Subaru’s tried and true engine architecture (and the engine format for their legendary WRX sports sedan). The Scion’s mill has both Subaru’s and Toyota’s names on it, and the D-4S fuel-injection system incorporates both direct and port injection at each cylinder, and is derived from the Lexus IS F platform. The flat Boxer layout not only allows for a low center of gravity, but it’s mounted far enough back in the engine compartment to help achieve a 53:47 front-to-rear weight ratio for optimal handling. The weight balance and the rear-drive chassis makes drifting the tail on corner exits a simple affair, and makes you wonder what wild goodness will be possible when the tuning set gets their hands on this car and starts tweaking it for all kinds of racing applications.

Inside, the enthusiast designers continued to have their way, including a top of the dash they describe as a “flat-horizon” design, influenced by “the simple purity of the Toyota 2000GT dash.” That’s a classic roadster that goes back to James Bond’sYou Only Live Twicedays. There’s 2+2 seating, but we say fold down those tiny rear seats for cargo use so your supermodel can toss in her ultralight backpack filled with low-mass lingerie for a quick getaway. With a base price around $25K, buy two and use one for club racing and one for the street. Brilliant.

NOT-SO-EVIL TWIN
Then you have a joint venture such as Toyota and Subaru combining their design resources to build an awesome new coupe, the result is a car that each manufacturer is proud to put its name on. If you’d like something slightly different from the Scion FR-S, try the Subaru BRZ. Like a couple of hot twins, they are pretty much identical, yet there are subtle differences (like the Subaru having a standard navigation system and therefore a higher base price). For the buyer it’s all good, because it just increases buying options and dealer choices so you can get your perfect ride.