Reader competition: win a Toyota GT86!

UPDATE: the competition closes midnight on Tuesday 8 October - not long to enter... 

To celebrate our twentieth anniversary, we at Top Gear magazine have teamed up with Toyota to offer you the chance to win our reigning Car of the Year, the stunning GT86.

That's right. An entire GT86 worth £24,995. A new one. Complete with wheels, tyres, floor mats, the whole lot. A box-fresh, 197bhp slice of rear-drive, coupe-shaped goodness, a machine of sheer mechanical rightness. A car that beat competition from the Porsche Boxster, McLaren 12C Spider and Pagani Huayra to be crowned our favourite car of 2012. A car that could soon be sitting on your driveway.

But what makes the GT86 so very, very good? Over to the TG mag team to explain...

"The GT86 has delightful balance," wrote motoring editor Ollie Marriage after Top Gear's ‘Speed Week' showdown. "It shows the real benefits of a simple front-engine/rear-drive layout combined with a good old-fashioned mechanical diff. It just works and works well. The Toyota is dainty and maximises the benefits of its layout and low centre of gravity."

Senior writer Sam Philip agreed. "This is our sort of performance car," he noted after the team tested the GT86 across Scotland. "Good steering, nice crisp gearchange, revvy engine. You can find its limits and feel like a driving god without fear of being inadvertently deposited in a loch and devoured by otters."

It was named GT86 in honour of Toyota's legendary AE86 of 1983, a delicate, rear-drive coupe renowned even today as one of the finest-driving Japanese cars of all time. And it was the AE86's principles of lightness, balance and driving fun the Toyota engineers channelled into the GT86, employing a 2.0-litre boxer engine to keep the car's centre of balance low and its throttle responses sharp. The result is quite simply one of the purest, most unfettered drivers cars of the last decade.

"It's a car bursting with energy, spurring you to use every last gram of power," noted staff writer Dan Read after testing the GT86 in Wales last winter. "The GT86 as fizzy as a hot hatch, meeting each corner like a puppy greeting the postman..."

But the last word on the GT86 should be left to Mr Clarkson himself. Top Gear's notoriously tough-to-please leader nominated the Toyota as his favourite car of last year after thrashing it mercilessly around the Top Gear test track, heralding it as ‘a lovely car to drive'. Here's what the big man had to say about it.

"It's a car designed for one thing only: fun. It is a lovely car to drive..."

And it's a car that could be yours. For a chance to win a brand new GT86, CLICK HERE 

Competition closes at 11.59pm on Tuesday 8 October. Only open to UK residents. Terms and conditions apply