Toyota’s 4A-GE four-cylinder is a legend. This twin-cam, four-valve 1.6-liter engine found a home in many of Toyota’s best performance cars of the 1980s, the AE86 Corolla and AW11 MR2 being the most notable. Toyota Gazoo Racing, which offers reproduction parts for many classic Toyota models, just announced it’s making new blocks and heads for the AE86 Corolla Levin and Sprinter Trueno.
What’s interesting here is that Toyota is not simply making new parts—Gazoo Racing redesigned these parts to take advantage of advances in modern design and production techniques.
The head has additional machining for the combustion chambers, which Toyota says helps improve consistency from part to part. Toyota also polishes the intake ports to make the surface as smooth as possible. It also gets thicker walls for intake and exhaust ports, and Toyota redesigned the head to enable use in transverse configurations, like in front-wheel drive Corollas and Carinas.
(Though Toyota didn’t say it’d work in the MR2.)
Photo by: Toyota
For the block, Toyota uses a new cast-iron alloy to improve rigidity and uses a new honing process for the cylinder bores. Toyota also redesigned the crankshaft caps to up durability.
Toyota hasn’t announced pricing yet, but given the level of work it put into these parts and the complexity of manufacturing such intricate pieces in relatively low numbers, they won’t be cheap. But if you’re after a perfect 4A-GE, this is the way to go.
Toyota offers GR Heritage Parts for the 2000GT, the Mk3 and Mk4 Supra, AE86, plus 40-, 60-, 70-, and 80-series Land Cruisers. A lot of the parts are seemingly insignificant—gauges, hoses, gaskets, trim pieces—but if you’ve ever read the words “no longer available” when searching for car parts, you know how useful components like this can be.
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Source: Toyota
The 4A-GE head and block are the largest, most complex GR Heritage Parts offerings yet. Toyota does sell GR Heritage parts in the US, too, though it hasn’t announced when, or if, we’ll get this cylinder head and block here.
Toyota will reveal these parts to the public at a 30th anniversary celebration of Initial D this weekend at Fuji Speedway. For Japan at least, Toyota plans to put these on sale next May, but only if there’s sufficient demand. So, deep-pocketed AE86 owners, you know what to do.
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