The JDM Toyota GR86 Anniversary Edition celebrates 40 years since the AE86

Toyota is celebrating 40 years since the original AE86 entered stage right, mostly sideways, through a series of tweaks to its RWD hero. And as befits a 40th anniversary gift, there is a ‘ruby’ present.

Because it’s red. One of them, anyway. The other one’s white, but both cars get an interesting suite of upgrades that should sharpen up the already-really-very-good base GR86 coupe.

Said upgrades include a shiny new set of Sachs dampers said to “achieve both comfort and stability”, along with a shiny new set of rather large ventilated Brembo brake discs said to offer “stable braking power even under difficult conditions”. Frankly, all this talk of ‘stability’ is unnerving considering it pays homepage to a famously unstable drift hero.

Still, it looks the part, complete with black detailing, new wheels and tyres, and the option of some anniversary decals and a neat rear spoiler to finish off the exterior finish. Inside it’s as before, only with more black and red detailing, and you should definitely spec the optional anniversary floor mats.

Only 200 of these special GR86s will be built, and they’re all being kept for Japan, available via lottery that you can enter from 25 Sept through to 9 October. So it won’t matter to consumers outside of Japan that the manual GR86 costs 3,822,000 yen, or that the automatic car costs 3,920,000 yen. Yeah, happy anniversary.