by TRD Man » Thu Jan 11, 2007 10:38 am
Warwick, I am happy to acknowledge that you are a very good friend of TS and a very fine Toyota person with a special interest in TRD.
Please pay me the courtesy of reciprocating by acknowledging my longtime relationship with TRD during which I made many visits and counted many of it's top executives as friends & colleagues.
Indeed few people would have visited TRD as often as myself and during these visits I often saw many things that neither appear in any catalogue or microfiche nor conform to what I understood as their standard business model.
As an astute person, and businessman, I know what I saw and I know what I discussed.
I can't tell you with absolute certainty the destination of the 60 or so Mk2 that were in a production line at the TRD factory.
I can tell you that I was told they were showroom stock, as apposed to customer orders, and that TRD themslves produced the sales brochure for them. (I actually brought a wad of them home).
Whether they were a stock order by one dealership or a special run by TRD, which is what I was led to believe, it is clear that at the time they had no 'end user'. They would therefore qualify as a "TRD produced special for sale".
Despite the size of TRD they still had facility to cater for indivdual one off requirements.
Cars like the TRD 2000GT (MR2) & the TRD 3000GT (Supra) were made to order to a variable specification of the customers choosing.
In the 90's TRD & TOM'S had a particularly close working relationship. In fact it was TRD who introduced me to TOM'S as their very good development partners.
I recall seeing stacks of F3 engines in the TRD store which were a joint development project between the 2 companies.
As I said in my earlier post TOM'S produce, and have done for many years, a 2.2 bored & stroked 3SGE.
As this engine would have evolved in the mid 90's it is entirely possible that TRD were involved in it's development and that it was offered as a special option or after market sale, albeit in limited numbers.
Is it likely that this Curren has a TRD engine (if one exists) ? No, it's not.
But to rule it out entirely without all of the information is arrogance. And believe you me, no matter how much information Toyota may furnish you with, when it comes to happenings in Japan, there'll be a significant amount they don't even know about.
One thing we do know is that if it should have a 'special' TRD or other spec 2.2 3SGE it ought to go very well.