just an opinion.. if you are building a track car, wouldn't it help identifying which track you're going? the SIC with its long straights, flowing corners.. the MR-S or a Lotus would really shine between turn 1 to 2 & 7 to 11.. but overall it would be advantageous to a high powered ride such as an EVO or STi.
and I've always wondered why Toyota did not put the 2zz in the MR-S and the 1zz in the Celica instead. I suspect someone must have mixed up the engine & chassis matching documents when they submitted it to the CEO for approval.
Haha, we certainly hope that was the case, Toyota, being a big manufacturer;like many other car manufacturer makes cars for what the consumer demands. Initially the celica (zzt321) was positioned against the Honda dc5 (which they had hope to cut into that market).
The mrs or rather the 3 version/of the famous mr2 platform wasn't a must do project for toyota. The story was some rather passionate engineers within Toyota drew plans, ideas to revive the mr2 for the 3rd reincarnation. (all plans, developement work was on their own time, being passionate of it, they submitted to the board)
Now to understand this, one need to look back into the 90s, why Toyota (manufactuerer) didn't think it was worth to continue from sw20( 2 gen mr2). The aw11 or the first mr2 was a great success in sales, that time no one expected an affordable midship n fun sports car. In truth the aw11 scored a first for many car enthusiast. The miata only came in after the aw11 n built on 'such' market, created their own formula n it become the best selling sports cars in numbers n (no other sports cars even today could match or top the mx5 sales numbers)
The sw20 came when car enthusiast felt the aw11 was a little underpowered, Toyota relented. Initially the sales weren't too bad, still it wasn't able to match the sales numbers of aw11, & when the big crunch in the mid 90s where the yen bubble boiled, the last years of the new mrsp SW20 prices in US came to almost US35-40k at the toyota dealers!!! That's almost twice the amount many mr2 fellas would baulk their $$ for. I think only less than 40 units in that final year. (I think one can try goggle this (I actually read this from somewhere(pre net days)).
A car company like Toyota needed to go back to the drawing boards if the wanted to make money. The felt the opportunity would have been better if they basket it into the current celica. Yamaha was commissioned to make the (2zz) engines.
The marketing ppl n the board i guess felt the market would be more comfortable with the celica, the mrs only came by when the engineering chums felt deeply behind it, but not to the mrkt ppl. the Toyota guys didn't even promote much of the mrs after the launch. The USA would have been the biggest single market for Toyota, even the spyder enthusiast in US many acknowledge came to know of the mrs by chance. Very little advertisement promoted it. few magazine ads, even in the US where TV commercials is huge, there was non on mrs alone, a 1/2 sec glimpse of the car in their corporate toyota was about it, unlike its predesesor (I think it's written in the mr2 history/ books of, on mr2)
Lotus only had Toyota for help for them to enter the US market, since back then the were some working relationship between the 2, n since all the plans of the zz engines were already approved (edmission) for the US market, it was a no brainer.
Lotus-Honda? Well, if you read into the 'supposedly' story, when honda first approached lotus to develope n make their foray into F1 (way back then) lotus (colin chapman) couldn't n didn't do it, hence then Honda supposedly felt slighted, n vowed if they can not to collaborate...
