Toyota wanted to celebrate an F1 win with a car like this

This is the Toyota FXS concept from the 2001 Tokyo motor show – a gathering of motor cars long known for its comical concepts, although it must be said that the FXS took itself rather seriously. Its name stood for ‘Future Experimental Sports’, though it doesn’t seem to cover any discussion about adding breakdancing to the list of Olympic competitions. 

It was certainly no Yaris. The FXS’s nose was already there in 2001 to prove that you don’t need a giant grille to create a front end only a mother could love. Toyota said ‘gorgeously curvy’, we say ‘worryingly swollen, you should probably get that checked out’. The FXS showed a dark side to the blandness that characterised Toyota at the turn of the millennium, some of the racebred passion we’ve seen emerge in more recent times. 

The design theme, according to Toyota, was ‘a simple and sexy form with a sense of presence’. A bold statement to make, but also vague enough that it could mean absolutely anything. It could as easily describe a Love Island contestant as a racy convertible. 

We do like the wheels – check out those ripples, it’s like the car is moving even when it isn’t. There was nothing particularly crazy on the FXS, lack of roof and a curvy windscreen aside. The sleek-yet-in your face stylings of the concept were supposed to be a toe in the water of something fun to come. That said, Toyota did bring 16 other concepts to the same motor show, one of which was a van with an office in the back. They must have run out of the cool ideas by the time they were working on this thing. Still, the inside is fun – all leather, chrome and bits of blue.

Indeed it was – underneath the metal, the FXS concept is a big chunk of Lexus SC430, that solid early 2000s classic. Depending on your point of view it’s either a misunderstood comfortable grand tourer, or if you’re two particular former TG presenters, the SC430 was the worst car in the history of the world. That was in 2012, though, there might have been a change since.

The main donation of note was the engine, a 4.3-litre V8 producing 288bhp and 317lb ft of torque in the Lexus. In that car it was perky enough to get from 0–62mph in a mere 6.2 seconds. A nifty addition to that set-up was a six-speed sequential manual transmission. 

Well – given that nothing like the Future Experimental Sports car has emerged from a Toyota factory in the intervening 20 years, you might imagine that whatever the experiment was, it failed. Perhaps the bar was set a little too high. In its press release introducing the concept, Toyota GB said: ‘Will it be built and if so, when will it be on sale? Toyota isn’t committing – who knows, maybe to celebrate their first win in F1!’

Presumably the Toyota show car ended up in the same deep storage as each of the company’s non-race-winning F1 cars. Jokes – those are all at the company’s motorsport headquarters in Cologne. Who knows where the FXS has ended up. There was talk at the 2001 Tokyo show of the Japanese carmaker producing a sports car powered by an exciting V12 engine, but only to coincide with success in the top flight of motorsport. Awkward. Still – if you were happy to wait 11 years there was a nice V10-powered Lexus on the way. That was alright.