Mighty Turtle, Stay Alive!

The life story of Saitama Toyopet’s green warrior - the No. 52 GR Supra GT.

To the casual eye, there is probably not a great deal of difference between the green No. 52 Toyota Supra seen in photographs from 2020 to 2026 and the Supras built by apr. Look at the car instead as a collection of parts, air passages and compromises accumulated over six seasons, and the original Supra has long since disappeared.

First, its ancestry needs sorting out.

It is tempting to imagine that Saitama Toyopet Green Brave simply received a finished car from apr and gradually started modifying it. That is not quite what happened. Even the 2020 machine was officially described by the team as its own JAF-GT project, although nobody tried to conceal the involvement of apr and TCD - Toyota Customization & Development.

And the family resemblance was certainly real. The project borrowed proven ideas from apr’s rear-wheel-drive Prius, along with some chassis components and mechanical hardware, while the aerodynamics were developed with TCD involvement. So this was not an apr car painted another shade of green. It was another branch growing from the same engineering tree.

One small but important detail about the team itself. Saitama Toyopet is attached to a Toyota dealership group. LM Corsa, for example, is connected with Osaka Toyopet, while K-tunes represents Okayama Toyopet. Saitama has openly stated that one purpose of its racing programme is to train dealership personnel under race conditions. That alone deserves some respect. Motorsport being used not merely to sell cars, but to teach people how to build and maintain them properly.

Before the Supra, Saitama Toyopet raced a Mark X built around the Mother Chassis concept. In 2020 it was replaced by an entirely new GR Supra GT silhouette - which promptly won its very first race at Fuji. By the end of the season it had taken two victories, with Hiroki Yoshida and Kohta Kawaai finishing second in the GT300 championship.

That was unusual enough. A new privately developed JAF-GT car did not require two seasons merely to stop making life difficult for the people who had built it. It was quick immediately, which meant there was something worth developing. And Green Brave soon began moving away from the original recipe in areas other than aerodynamics.

The No. 52 used a further development of what the team called its evo suspension, an idea carried over from the MC86 era. Its kinematics were arranged so that steering input also influenced the attitude of the front of the car and, through that, the way load was distributed across the tyres. No electronics, no active suspension and no black magic. Just links, wishbones, pickup points and a little engineering cheek.

Other Supras built from the same basic family could already use different suspension solutions. Quite early in their lives, therefore, the phrase “identical Supras” referred mostly to the outline.

A particularly well-documented next step arrived in 2023. Changes to the GTA-GT300 regulations sent Green Brave back to the wind tunnel. The first new aerodynamic package was actually worse than the 2022 bodywork. The team did not fit it merely because it was new. They went away, revised it again, and only transferred the second version to the race car after it had demonstrated a genuine improvement.

The three-element guide vanes at the front remained, but the lowest flap was raised relative to the nose edge. Behind the front fender a distinctive serrated section appeared - designed to generate vortices and help evacuate air from the wheel housing.

The bonnet exit changed. So did the rear portion of the front fenders and the area around the rear wheelarches. At the same time the team managed to remove roughly five kilograms.

By then, information was no longer flowing in only one direction between Saitama and apr either. Successful ideas developed on one car could migrate to the other. Two related designs were gradually becoming not copies, but two parallel racing laboratories. We know how that particular development cycle ended: consecutive victories at Sugo and Autopolis, followed by the GT300 championship.

The title matters here for more than the statistics. By 2023 the No. 52 had matured to the point where Green Brave no longer needed to search for one miraculous upgrade. Its speed came from accumulating smaller gains across the floor, bodywork, wheel housings, suspension and tyres.

Then, in the autumn of 2024, an Armco barrier offered its own contribution to the development programme. The accident at Sugo seriously damaged precisely the parts one least enjoys destroying on a car like this: the lower front bodywork, outer panels, rear fenders, diffuser, boot lid and rear wing.

Almost simultaneously, GTA reduced the permitted front-tyre size for its own GT300 category for 2025, from 330/710 to 300/680.

Green Brave could have manufactured copies of the destroyed parts and then adapted them to the smaller tyre. Instead, the thinking appears to have been rather more sensible: if everything had to be cut up and built again anyway, they might as well cut it up properly.

Osamu Kondo later described the result in wonderfully simple terms: almost nothing from the old body remained unchanged apart from the roof and doors. The team put virtually the entire car back through the wind tunnel, from nose to tail, and manufactured a fresh set of exterior components. The work became extensive enough that Green Brave had to miss the official Okayama test because the body panels simply were not ready.

And the smaller front tyre meant much more than making the fender narrower.

Both width and outside diameter were reduced. Sidewall deflection under load changed, and with it the behaviour of the contact patch and the car’s sensitivity to camber and toe. Effective front ride height changed. Braking behaviour had to be reconciled again with longitudinal suspension kinematics, roll-centre behaviour with the aerodynamic platform, and the airflow around the smaller rotating tyre with both the wheel housing and the floor.

So the 2025 Supra received reshaped front fenders and nose openings, revised bonnet outlets containing small flow-control devices and additional lateral elements. A redesign that began around the front wheel eventually propagated all the way to the rear of the car.

This was no longer a bodywork update. Green Brave was tying tyre, suspension and aerodynamics together again from scratch.

The car was revised once more over the winter of 2025/26. Here the public information becomes rather thinner than we would like: the team has not published a convenient shopping list of everything that changed.

The stopwatch supplied some evidence instead. At its first official Okayama test the No. 52 finished the final day at the top of the GT300 order. Rikuto Nonaka said the speed had appeared immediately, although there was still work to do in understanding and setting up the updated car.

A victory at Fuji followed. By the time Green Brave reached Suzuka, the crew was leading the championship. Which makes the consequences of the latest No. 52 accident rather more serious than the usual photograph of a battered racing car suggests.

In principle, another green body can always be made. Given enough money, carbon fibre, aluminium and sleepless mechanics, most things can.

The technical problem is that they are not rebuilding a generic Supra. They are rebuilding a unique machine whose suspension, floor, wheel housings, exterior aerodynamics and dozens of smaller parts have been altered continuously over six seasons, many of them existing in tiny quantities or effectively as one-offs. The Suzuka damage was severe enough that the car could not even be raised normally on its built-in air jacks.

If the primary structure has survived, Green Brave still faces the enormous task of reproducing a collection of bespoke parts. If it has not, the question is no longer whether the mechanics can bolt another fender onto the car before the next race.

There is a certain symmetry to all this. The Sugo accident in 2024 accidentally helped create the 2025 car: if so much of the old machine had to be rebuilt anyway, the engineers decided to rebuild it better. Now the story has come full circle.

There is less than a month until Sugo. The No. 52 is fighting for the championship. And today’s Green Brave is no longer merely one of the cars that once grew from apr’s engineering ideas.

It is six years of accumulated engineering decisions that happens to be shaped like a Toyota Supra.

Mighty Turtle, stay alive.