Having previously completed a couple of three-day Drag Challenge Weekend events amongst plenty of local racing in his native Queensland, William Yarwood really stepped things up in 2024. Not only did he take on the full five-day Street Machine Drag Challenge torture test, but he also finished the event with a Speed Pro Six-Cylinder class win and in ninth place overall!

First published in the June 2025 issue of Street Machine

William’s JZA80 Toyota Supra RZ does bulk kilometres with its turbo 3.0-litre 2JZ six spitting out more than 1300rwhp, which nets him regular eight-second ETs on the drag strip. However, all that racing takes its toll, and 2024 saw plenty of downtime for the swoopy coupe.

“I broke the diff at the start of last year, and you can’t buy that crown wheel and pinion for the RZ models anymore, so I had to wait three months for a new diff,” William recalls. “On the first pass back after that, I let go of the transbrake button and broke both axles, so I had to wait another three months for new axles from America. The first time back at the track after that, I split a cylinder in the block two weeks before Jamboree! It was not good prep heading into DC.”

This unfortunate attrition rate speaks to how much use the Supra gets both on track and street. “I classify it as a proper street car, because I take my kids to school in it, it has every original Toyota feature like air conditioning, and it gets driven on the street most weeks,” says William.

“After Jamboree, I did every test ’n’ tune I could get to so I could keep dialling the tune in, plus I drive it to roll racing most months and race it there, too. I nearly thought about driving it down to DC from Queensland, but we didn’t have time.”

The big red coupe ran as quick as 8.54@163mph at DC ’24 with a pretty basic mechanical package, including a Powerglide auto and the factory IRS centre with aftermarket axles. The engine is based around a Dart block sourced from the 2JZ gurus at Goleby’s Parts, filled with a stock Toyota crank, Nitto rods and 9:1 CP slugs, while the head has been fitted with Supertech titanium hardware, along with Brian Crower 272/276 cams.

William recently swapped from a Garrett G42 turbo to a GTX50 in pursuit of low eight-second timeslips. “I was out of turbo with the G42, so now that it has a GTX50, it’s making 1345rwhp,” he says.

With a Haltech Nexus R5 VCU, CAN keypad and iC-7 dash controlling things, William has the luxury of running E85 at the track and regular unleaded on the street, which came in handy on DC. “The car is flex-fuel tuned, but I don’t normally change it from E85. I did on Drag Challenge though, because we had to drive through the night from Mildura to The Bend, and I wasn’t sure of my fuel economy or which servos would be open,” William says.

“I have different torque-limiting engine maps for drag racing on different track conditions, as well as traction control-based maps for roll racing, all changed through the keypad. We’d also changed to an 80mm drive-by-wire throttle before DC, so as we were leaving Calder Park on Day One, we had the laptop plugged in and we set-up cruise control, which was a life-saver.”

All of this from a car William has owned for more than a quarter-century! “The business a few doors down had imported this ’93 six-speed manual twin-turbo RZ – which is the model everybody wants – and it was dead stock, with about 30,000km,” he says, recapping how the Supra entered his life. “I paid a fortune for it back then, and then the arse fell out of the market!”

With more than 100,000km covered since then, along with eight-second ETs and 1300 horses at the wheels, we wouldn’t be letting it go any time soon!

WILLIAM YARWOOD
1993 TOYOTA SUPRA RZ

Class:

Speed Pro Six-Cylinder