Toyota 2000GT - Bond Car or Kawaii Shockwave | Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

Hello and welcome to another

classic

Tyrells

workshop

, this time we are looking at this little beauty, the Toyota 2000 GT, a hugely influential car in its own way and, uh, very low production, very low number of units manufactured and very valuable, I dare you Let's say it, but the real essence of this car is that it was a game-changer on the Japanese automaker landscape and indeed on the world stage. The Japanese automotive industry in the late 50s and early 60s wasn't exactly brilliant, it wasn't setting the world on fire. to say the least, and Toyota were so desperate to burst into the United States with some pretty average cars that weren't even prepared to drive on the road for a long period of time, they were horribly unreliable, I mean it seems like we don't we are.

We're talking about the same company we have today, but back then it was a very different story and they were selling their sedans in the United States in the 1960s and they were so desperate to sell them that they didn't call them Toyota, they called them Toyo Pet , would you believe it? It sounds like the kind of animal, you know, charming and cuddly and um, that no household could do without in the 1960s, so even that didn't work and in fact it got to a point where they lost a million and a half Dollars. which was a lot of money back then, in 1960, trying to sell these cars and failing, so they had to do something radical, and then in 1965, Nissan and Toyota were competing for, um, trying to get a real foothold in the lucrative US market. and they made some credible cars and had saloons starting to appear, but nothing really wonderful, nothing fantastic, certainly no halo cars and, as we know, history has shown that they absolutely swept the park in the 1970s with things like the Toyota Datsun 240z. seleca, I mean monstrously successful cars, but things were very different, so let's go back to 1967, this car went into production, it's a very expensive car, it was a joint venture, it was mainly developed by yamaha, the musical instrument makers , that's what they were mainly known for.

At that time they had been making musical instruments since the late 19th century and musical instruments of fantastic quality even to this day. The c c3 c6 c7 range of pianos are industry standard and have a slightly brighter sound than bechteins, bluthners or steinways, but they are still a fantastic reference quality instrument and, as I have said on many occasions before, the line between a musical instrument and a high-performance car engine is very thin, it's a form of wind instrument, and that obviously didn't go unnoticed by Yamaha, so they developed this car initially for Nissan. Nissan didn't fall in love with it for some reason, so Toyota started collaborating with Yamaha and Yamaha designed the basic concept, so the engine they took was a very boring family sedan engine.

The low-end Toyota Crown engine. a two liter six cylinder cast iron block and Yamaha worked their magic with the engine, they designed a twin cam cylinder head for the engine which took a fairly conventional and boring two liter pushrod engine and turned it into a lovely twin-cam engine and three double-choke carburetors. which developed about 150 brake horsepower and this car weighs just over a ton, it's very light, so that equates to a top speed of about 135 miles per hour, depending on the final drive ratio you specify and this for a two-liter car from the 1960s. For any car it was moving at 135 miles per hour, but this car, as I say, completely changed the world.

In fact, it wasn't immediately apparent how important this car was. Japan made very boring square sedans until then, American manufacturers. They thought they had the American market their way, but then this came along and it was 20 more than a new E-type Jaguar, so almost none of them sold, but they were pretty successful in a number of ways to begin with, they set 15 land speed records. and also Carol Shelby took them to the US and raced them very successfully in scca competition. This is the same Carol Shelby who, if I'm not mistaken, said there is no substitute for cubic inches and here she is with a 2 liter car, so it is a very successful car, but it really is small and very aerodynamic, but The point of this car is that it shocked the world and sent shock waves through the automotive industry because the Japanese are naturally interested in the nobility of detail, if you will, they are interested.

Both what you can't see and what you can see, and this whole car has been obsessively designed by Yamaha and Toyota and abounds in flourishes of technical delight. It was actually the first Japanese car to have disc brakes everywhere. The dashboard, which is rosewood, was made by Yamaha's musical instrument department to give it that fantastic mirror finish that they were able to achieve on the wood and the whole thing is that every little piece of engineering is beautifully made. It has a very light independent rear suspension that worked very well. wheels and mag alloy were state of the art at the time so we restored this car about three four years ago and essentially the body work was good but everything else wasn't so we had to start over Again, we had to do a lot. of reconditioning work on the interior and also mechanically and the curious thing is that they manufactured 351 2000 gts in total, about 60 of them were left-hand drive for the US market and the rest were right-hand drive for the Japanese domestic market and the rest of the world and obviously some of them ended up here, this has been here I think pretty much since day one, but the funny thing is we had another one to work on while this one was being restored, so we actually had two. of them next to each other in the

workshop

and considering that these things can change hands for up to 1.2 million dollars approximately £800,000, I mean they are incredibly sought after and incredibly collectible, so having two of them here with a combined value of Two and a half million dollars was really interesting, but what we did when we were restoring this car gave us a fantastic canvas to work on the other car because it had parts that were missing from this card for a long time, One of the things we were able to replicate the engine data transfer in Japanese on the air filter housing and meticulously got all the characters right on that, so I was able to tell the owner that we have the engine trim and call exactly like them.

I had it new on its engine, they are as beautiful things as we can make, which makes it very satisfying, so the car needs a tune-up, a little work, we discovered that one of the gasoline pipes that goes from the tank to the carburetors were in very bad condition, in fact they were cracked and dripped fuel if you touched them, this is the problem, especially with the appearance of ethanol-based fuels, we have to be very careful with these things, I don't want to alarm. Anything except checking the fuel lines is very, very important on

classic

cars because ethanol wreaks havoc on them, even at five percent, it corrodes them and can cause problems, so, yeah, that's if you learn some this video.

Check the fuel lines of your classic car. I'll talk about that in another video at some point in the future, I don't know when, but we'll see what work we're doing on the car and also a couple of really nice design facets of this and then we'll take it out on the road and test it. One of the smart things about this car is the packaging, the center line of the front wheel of the car is quite far forward. as it is for good handling, but the engine is actually what is called a front mid engine, so all the weight of the engine is behind the center line of the front axle, which makes it very, very good from the start. weight distribution point of view, one of the beauties of this car.

The weight distribution is 51 front 49 rear, which is kind of the halo moment that an automaker wants to be in because you get good traction, the weight distribution is equal, and most of the weight is within the distance. wheelbase of the car, which means you don't have it, it's not like some kind of bob weight situation like a Porsche 911 with the engine hanging in the back, so what I'm going to do is show you some of the little details of ingenuity. this and like I said, it's all about packaging and weight and what Toyota did very cleverly was they put an access panel on each side of the car because this area certainly on cars this area on modern cars typically have a huge windshield. washing machine reservoirs to cope with the high mileage that cars do these days, but in this day and age this was just a waste of space, so what I'm undoing here is just a couple of screws to hold this little panel in place here. and I can just To give you an idea of ​​how cleverly this car is packaged, so we just lift it out of there carefully and rest it there and then we have an access panel underneath, here's the battery, a heavy item again within the distance between axles to help with handling and the Same thing, on the other hand, you have a lot of components that have to do with the mechanical steering of the car, the infrastructure hidden behind there, so we just close that panel and put it back in its place, beautiful, cleverly thought out, so simple and yet, be surprised how many car manufacturers don't do that, so they have the battery trapped in the back of the car or on top, raising the center of gravity, it is close to the ground, it is within the wheelbase of the car, Bristol used this to great effect.

On quite a few of their cars you have the spare wheel on one side and the brake servos and battery on the other, but many manufacturers just didn't do that. Here's what sets this car apart and why it was such a radical change and why. It was a wake-up call to the rest of the world, from one minute making boring, boxy saloons to telling the world we've arrived, move on because Toyota is getting better and boy did they look at them now, well, another side to this. car, that's really interesting is that these are not the headlights that you see here, they are driving lights, they are supplementary lights, real headlights are something that is so cool, but they were eliminated by safety regulations a few years ago, now pop-up headlights rise.

Light your eyes and illuminate my life. This car, when it originally arrived at the shop a while ago, was missing several parts, so we had to use some improvisation and also use the other car as a template. One such example is these rather nice little chrome trims that James had to make from scratch, but they look quite nice now that we had them chrome at the time and I dare say they are indistinguishable from the originals. Shields can't beat a good shield with this car, obviously it was restoring it and bringing it back to very good working order but it wasn't doing it concore and in fact this is probably used regularly, this car is probably the most driven

toyota

2000 gt on the planet.

Well, one of the other interesting facets of this car is that it was a James Bond car and it was used in You Only Live Twice the Bond movie with Sean Connery from the 1960s and it was actually filmed making a very quick getaway. at high speed in one of these cars and it had a beautiful, very petite Japanese actress playing her counterpart in Japan named Aki, who worked for the Japanese secret service and the problem was that she couldn't really fit in. In this car, its six-foot-two-inch frame wouldn't fit, so they ended up cutting the roof off a 2000 GT, two of them so that it could, at least with the help of some clever editing, get into the car without too much.

Anyway, there are already many problems. Now I'll get in the car and we'll take it for a run. Well, there we are, so well, that went well. I feel wonderfully relaxed and settled in this little car, um it's still a great piece of kit although this beautiful rosewood dash is still in superb condition and if I can describe this car it's something of a dual, that's how I'd put it , everything in the car is like jewelry, these are, you know? These chrome bezels on the gauges, sort of Bentley, invented those very similar ones you see against the wood in the late 90s, Molina Speck, Turbo RS and Mulsannes, but it's all just lovely, I mean.

This look has obviously been around for a long time, chrome over wood, but it looks great here, but everything is light, the dash is too thin, um, mechanically, the car is also very advanced, you've got this lovely little slick. Five speed gearbox that just clicks from gear to gear, just lovely and I'm slowly warming up to it at the moment. You know, the Japanese had a five-speed gearbox on thiscar in 1967, when Ferrari had just launched it in models like the 275 GTB, the five-speed box in a road car a year or two before, Jaguar had just brought out its new gearbox in the E-type, which was a box four-speed or synchromesh, but this is obviously very different. just great driving is really again, it's not a frenetic ride, it's very much a 60's ride, quite smooth, quite relaxed and just brings the car to life, yes as always the car is starting to pick up the pace now and come to life. and now that things have warmed up, it's very precise, it's got beautiful rack and pinion steering, that independent suspension, I'll try the engine now that it's warmed up a bit, yes, it runs well enough for a two liter car the '60s, it really does that. beautiful five-speed gearbox that simply clicks into the different gears.

The beautifully precise timing still works perfectly, there's no hint of gear crunching or anything like that and, yes, it's hard to remember that this car is worth three quarters of a million pounds or so because it's so small and so right in your face. face in one way with his precision this and precision that, but on the other hand, quite modest size and stature, but yes, very sweet, just charming, very happy to wander around a very useful car, assuming you can get in and out of it, but um, yeah, very sweet, yeah, this car feels kind of delicate.

If I can put it that way, everything feels quite delicate, I mean the gear change is very very delicate, just click and it's in fourth gear, the steering again is beautiful, you can just steer it with the tips of your fingers. fingers, very well configured, Carlos. I don't intend to push this car too hard out of respect for the car and the owner, but it just feels lovely. As I mentioned before, we've done some work on it, but sometimes trying to catalog it for these videos is difficult because it's all part of a commercial business and we have space for elevators and space for mechanics and all that stuff to worry about.

Sometimes it is not easy to show the work that is done. Unfortunately, it's something we'll try to do a little more in future videos, but sometimes it's not really feasible, but I notice we have an electrical problem with the instruments we'll need to fix it, which Pete, our electrician, will do very easily. The rev counter works just like the speedometer, but interestingly, the speedometer. in miles per hour so they really thought of everything because of course not many cars exported from Japan at the time had mile per hour speedometers, it was still in its infancy but I'll just give it, open it now. that warms up ah just a great feeling that really is this car just gives pleasure um no wonder it's kind of a step that sets the standard in the day of uh various things I want this to suddenly appear like something scruffy uh kind of from supposedly scruffy company, uh, it really was absolutely radical, it feels so beautifully forged and put together, yes, this car was shown a few weeks ago on the BBC's top gear program and is ready for another, another date, later this month , so I really just had a little window of time with this, let's make some new escape black boxes.

The exhaust system is very similar to a Jaguar E Type. No wonder, I guess Toyota had the E-Type in their sights and we've also had to do a couple more jobs but I really wanted to take the opportunity and luckily the owners of the jhw collection were happy for me to do this video and I thought it would be good to share because It's not a car, people usually come to see a lot of things and when we finished the restoration of this car, Toyota were so pleased with it that they displayed it at Goodwood that year, which was lovely, very nice, recognition, very nice praise, yes. this car just shrinks around you it feels like you are one with it it is so intimate not only space wise but control wise just absolutely beautiful i will open it again oh lovely just sweet brakes feel very reassuring to the brakes from the 60s Yes, slick, click click, go to the gears, just lovely, what a sweet car, I actually talked before about how this car is like a gem in some ways and the interior probably more than anything reflects this , every aspect has been carefully, methodically and exhaustively considered, this beautiful rosewood.

The dashboard, which was made by Yamaha with a piano-like finish, the exacting standards are still lovely when we restored it, we took the dashboard out, all this came out, we recovered it, we re-restored it, all the seats were disassembled and re- padding, even the carpet that I looked meticulously at the carpet piles and the hairs are very important, as we tell our customers when they call us to ask about finishing work and even things like the handbrake, this beautiful handbrake from ratchet that falls into the hand and it is perfectly natural to go that way. it's so much easier than this nice little detail and the gear change is lovely, really precise, five speeds, it's a real pleasure to use and everything is laid out clearly, it's a very very nice car, apart from the fact that it's worth a lot or maybe. why it's worth so much it's just a very sweet coral it has beautiful details uh yes it's a good place to be it's really good that's how it concludes another video of the classic Tyrolean workshop I hope you enjoyed it as always the soul of these things is how it shares and Subscribe, thanks for all that and we'll be back with something else soon.