Toyota 2JZ | Legendary engines
Few engines of the modern era, or even throughout motoring history as a whole, have as much name cache with all from die-hard enthusiasts to casuals, as Toyota’s 2JZ GTE.
The versatility, the tunability, the sturdiness of this 3.0-litre twin-turbocharged straight-six has made it a darling of the tuning world and of course, a bit of a movie star.
Serving between 1991 and 2002, primarily as the flagship engine for the A80 Supra, Toyota’s flagship sports GT, the 2JZ GTE is the ultimate development in the Japanese marque’s line of JZ straight-six engines.
For the early 1990s, the stock 2JZ GTE was an incredibly sophisticated and innovative thing, using sequential twin turbocharging for a balanced power delivery and matched the 964 Porsche 911 Turbo of the time for power with some 300CC less capacity. No wonder the 1995 993 got a bump to 3.6 litres and over 400PS.
Toyota didn’t sleep on the 2JZ GTE either, adding Variable Valve Timing for 1995. The naturally-aspirated version even got direct injection towards the end of its life, in a bid to improve efficiency and reduce emissions.
But it wasn’t this engine’s out-of-the-box 280-320PS form that defined it. It was what was possible when you opened the taps on it, because it’s perhaps one of the most overengineered, under-stressed engines ever sold.
Obviously there are inherent benefits of an inline-six – superior balance, incredible smoothness – but the 2J goes further. It’s shot through with go-harder engineering, with a bombproof iron block, great coolant and oil flow and even a forged crank.
This engine, using the stock bottom end, is a high-flow head, lumpy cams, a single turbo and some ancillary supporting mods away from near-on tripling its factory output, reliably so. And the sky is very nearly the limit the more money and mods you throw at it.
We understand that every vehicle is unique, which is why our Agreed Valuation policies take the true value of your classic car into account.
It’s something tuners realised quickly and throughout almost all of the 2J’s three and a bit decades, drag racers, drifters and all enthusiasts hungry for power have been shooting them through with steroids and beating on them from dawn til’ dusk, with relatively few issues.
Such was the fame of the 2J (and JZ family) in tuning car culture that it was the obvious candidate to be the hero engine (in the hero car) of a low-budget street racing movie. You may have heard of it – The Fast & The Furious.
A silly film though it and its many sequels are, there were no falsehoods or fictions perpetuated about the 2JZ. It’s every bit the athlete that the film portrayed. The result today is that the mk4 Supra is a lauded modern classic and the engine a living legend.
It’s still a top-shelf choice for those who want to modify and tune for big power today, with multiple drift champion James Deane just one of its many proponents, using one as he does in his crazy ‘Eurofighter’ E92 BMW 3 Series drift car. Some are also now on the hunt for ever-rarer unmodified examples of the Supra and other 2JZ GTE-engined Toyotas. Either way, this is a hero engine that many millennial enthusiasts grew up to meet, and happily, it almost always lived up to the hype.