Toyota Celica GT-Four ST205

This is the Toyota Celica GT-Four ST205 — the most powerful production Celica Toyota ever built, and the car that closed out one of Japan's great homologation-special lineages under a cloud of controversy.

Built from February 1994 to June 1999 with up to 255 PS from its 2.0-liter 3S-GTE turbo four, the ST205 traded the pop-up headlights of the ST165 and ST185 for squared-off Supra-inspired bodywork, and backed up its looks with a genuine WRC pedigree. But its story is inseparable from 1995's 'Turbogate' scandal, a hidden turbo restrictor that got Toyota disqualified from the Manufacturers' Championship and banned from the WRC — a scandal that still colors how this car is remembered today.

The Celica GT-Four line exists because of World Rally Championship homologation rules, which require manufacturers to build a minimum number of road-going versions of any car they intend to rally. Toyota built three distinct generations under this requirement: the ST165 (October 1986–August 1989), the "Super Round" ST185 (September 1989–September 1993), and the ST205 (February 1994–June 1999). Road cars came off the line at Toyota's Tahara plant in Aichi Prefecture, while the actual rally cars were prepared separately by Toyota Team Europe in Cologne, Germany.

The ST205 inherited a strong track record. The outgoing ST185 had already won the WRC Drivers' Championship in 1992, then swept both the Manufacturers' and Drivers' titles in 1993 and 1994. Carlos Sainz took the drivers' title in a Celica in 1990, Juha Kankkunen won both the drivers' and manufacturers' championships in 1993, and Didier Auriol repeated the manufacturers' win with his own drivers' title in 1994. Across all three GT-Four generations, the Celica won 30 rallies — more than any other Toyota sports car of the era.

The ST205 became Toyota's official WRC entrant in 1995, and it managed one outright victory that season before disqualification wiped it from the results. It also took the 1996 European Rally Championship. Beyond the results sheet, the GT-Four's broader significance was in being the first Japanese manufacturer to enter the WRC with a turbocharged all-wheel-drive car, take trophies, and win titles outright — a template that Subaru and Mitsubishi would later follow with the Impreza and Lancer Evolution.

The 1995 Turbogate scandal: New Group A regulations for 1995 capped power at 300 hp and required every car to run a 34mm turbocharger inlet restrictor to enforce that limit. Toyota's engineers built a restrictor plate that appeared compliant at rest, but under turbo load a hidden section would flex backward and let extra air through undetected — worth roughly 50 extra horsepower over a legal setup.

Officials found the device during Round 7, Rally Catalunya in Spain, the penultimate round of the 1995 season. The timing was brutal for Toyota: going into Catalunya, the year had been a three-way fight between Toyota, Subaru, and Mitsubishi, the Celica had already reached the podium seven times, and Finland's Juha Kankkunen was on course to win the Drivers' Championship. There was no evidence any driver knew about the device, but Kankkunen was stripped of all his points anyway, and Toyota was thrown out of the manufacturers' championship.

FIA President Max Mosley reportedly called the restrictor the "most ingenious thing" he'd seen in 30 years in the sport, and described its construction as "beautifully made" — before banning Toyota from the WRC for a year regardless. (One source, Project JDM, describes a two-year ban rather than one; most other accounts, including Girardo and CarBuzz, put it at a single season.) Toyota returned to competition in 1997 and continued into 1998, running the ST205 alongside the newer Corolla WRC.

The GT-Four story ended with the ST205. When the seventh-generation Celica arrived, Toyota didn't build an all-wheel-drive version at all, making the ST205 the last Celica ever offered with the GT-Four's signature drivetrain.

Sources disagree sharply on how many ST205s Toyota actually built, and it's worth laying out both figures rather than picking one arbitrarily.

- 2,500 units is the figure most commonly cited across auction houses, wikis, and buyer's guides (Iconic Auctioneers, Forza Wiki, JDMBUYSELL, classic.com, TEDGUM). This number is generally described as including roughly 2,100 for the Japanese domestic market.
- 10,469 units appears in at least one dealer listing (JDM Sport Classics), describing total worldwide production.

The gap is likely explained by scope: the widely repeated 2,500 figure appears to refer specifically to the Group A/WRC homologation batch — the specification required to satisfy FIA rules — rather than every ST205 sold to the public across all markets and trim levels. Buyers researching a specific car should treat any production-number claim with that distinction in mind.

Within that homologation batch, Toyota built a JDM-only "WRC" edition in 1994 with a rear bumper duct, a water-spray switch, hood vents, and a specific rear wing, built purely to satisfy WRC entry requirements. Standard road cars used the same 3S-GTE engine but without the disabled water-injection, anti-lag, and water-spray hardware carried over from the homologation cars.

Regional distribution was lopsided even by homologation-car standards:

- Only around 300 ST205s were originally sold new in Europe.
- The car was never officially imported to North America at all.
- Just 30 GT-Fours are currently registered in the UK, according to HowManyLeft — less than a tenth of what existed there in 2001.

Launch pricing tells the same exclusivity story. In 1994 the UK asking price for a road-going ST205 was £29,235, well above a Ford Escort Cosworth (£24,000) or a Subaru Impreza Turbo (£19,995), putting it out of reach for most buyers even before rarity became a factor. For comparison, the preceding ST185 generation had a "Carlos Sainz Limited" homologation edition built in far greater numbers — around 5,000 units — making the ST205 the scarcer car by a wide margin regardless of which total-production figure you use. Across the entire Celica nameplate, Toyota built 4,129,626 cars between 1970 and 2006; the GT-Four models are a sliver of that total, and the ST205 is the rarest and most valuable of the three.

The ST205 borrowed its visual language from the fourth-generation Supra and Soarer, trading the pop-up headlights of the ST165 and ST185 for fixed units and a more squared-off nose. Toyota stiffened the body structure while also making the car somewhat larger overall — and, despite the size increase, engineers managed to bring overall weight down compared to the outgoing ST185.

Dimensionally, the JDM-spec car measured 4,420mm long, 1,750mm wide, and 1,305mm tall, on a 2,535mm wheelbase, with a curb weight of 1,380kg. Compared to the ST185, the longer wheelbase and wider track gave the ST205 better front-to-rear weight distribution, and Toyota's engineers also improved the car's aerodynamic efficiency over the previous generation.

The homologation-spec cars carried visible aero and cooling hardware not found on lesser Celicas of the same era:

- A raised rear wing, fitted as standard rather than an option.
- A bonnet spoiler and additional hood vents to manage underbonnet heat.
- An anti-lag system with a WRC-specific heat shield (present in hardware but disabled on road cars).
- A water spray-bar aimed at the intercooler (also disabled on road cars).
- An aluminum hood to help offset the added structural stiffening.
- Four-channel ABS as standard equipment.

None of this was styling for its own sake — every piece traces back to what Toyota Team Europe needed on the WRC-spec car, then had to homologate onto the road-going version in sufficient numbers to satisfy FIA rules.

The ST205 used the third generation of Toyota's 3S-GTE, a 2.0-liter turbocharged inline-four the company produced in various forms from 1986 to 2007. It's derived from the naturally aspirated 3S-GE, but built for boost: a cast-iron block, forged crankshaft and connecting rods, lightweight aluminum pistons, and a 16-valve DOHC aluminum head — designed by Yamaha — with pent-roof combustion chambers and centrally located spark plugs.

Displacement is 1,998cc, with a bore and stroke of 86.0mm x 86.0mm and a compression ratio of 8.5:1. Output figures vary depending on which market's spec sheet you're reading, which is a common point of confusion among buyers:

- JDM-spec cars: 255 PS (188 kW) at 6,000 rpm, with 304 Nm (224 lb-ft) of torque at 4,000 rpm.
- Australian and UK/European-spec cars: 242 hp, due to market-specific tuning.
- US-market spec sheets (relevant mainly to imported grey-market cars, since the ST205 was never officially sold new in North America): 239 hp and 223 lb-ft of torque.
- Gran Turismo 7's in-game modeling lists 251.5 hp, a further data point on how much this figure shifts by source.

Toyota's own marketing called it the most powerful GT-Four built, crediting new valve timing along with turbocharger and intercooler revisions for the gains over the ST185. Performance figures generally converge around a 0-62 mph time of 6.1 seconds and a top speed of 153 mph, in a car weighing between 1,380kg (JDM spec) and roughly 1,430kg depending on source and equipment level.

Power went through a five-speed manual gearbox to a full-time all-wheel-drive system, splitting torque 50/50 front-to-rear via a viscous coupling center differential. Both the ST185 RC and the ST205 added a standard Torsen limited-slip differential at the rear axle, a step up from the basic system used on the original ST165.

The 3S-GTE has proven to have real headroom for tuning: the engine is capable of at least 360 hp without internal modification, while retaining its original water charge cooler. Around £1,000 in aftermarket parts — an induction kit, sports exhaust, and boost controller — will unlock meaningful gains, though the factory ECU cannot be fully remapped; owners chasing power beyond a certain point need a replacement ECU rather than a reflash.

The ST205's signature technical feature is its front "Super Strut Suspension," a hybrid design that modifies a conventional MacPherson strut to reduce the moment of inertia around the steering axis and cut camber angle relative to the ground. Toyota engineered it to fit existing suspension mounting points, so the same basic geometry could be used across JDM, European, and export-spec Celicas without redesigning the chassis for each market.

Mechanically, the system uses front and rear lower arms connected by rod-ends to a connector plate. The rear arm carries a rubber bushing at its inner end; the front arm uses a ball joint, letting both arms pivot as the suspension moves through its travel. In practice, this means the strut itself barely rotates during steering — it moves the same amount as the front lower arm, since the two are rigidly linked. The steering knuckle does most of the work instead: the outboard strut shifts rearward slightly on turn-in while the hub moves forward, and the combined effect keeps actual wheel movement to a minimum.

At the rear, the works rally car used a suspension layout similar to the standard road car's multi-link setup, but with polyurethane bushings in place of rubber and no change to the stabilizer bars. Later road cars also received four-channel ABS as standard.

Owners and enthusiast sources generally rate the ST205 as the best-driving of the three GT-Four generations by a clear margin — the added power, more refined chassis, and improved all-wheel-drive system are said to put it in the same conversation as a contemporary Impreza WRX STI or Lancer Evolution III. The Super Strut system is a big part of that reputation, delivering notably precise front-end response when everything is properly maintained.

That maintenance is the catch. Super Strut components are complex, expensive, and increasingly hard to source new. Owners and forums flag several recurring problem areas:

- Figure-8 suspension links wearing out over time.
- A rear differential that's considered a suspect component on higher-mileage cars.
- Boost above roughly 1.1 bar becoming problematic on an otherwise standard fuel and engine setup.
- Differential mount failure, leading to differential play and a clunking noise.
- Surface rust throughout the body and undercarriage, though this is mostly superficial rather than structural.
- Ring-land failure — checking the dipstick for excessive blow-back is a recommended way to spot compression escaping into the sump.

Some owner reports also describe a tendency to run hot, worsened by a failing water pump or a clogged radiator, alongside general turbocharger wear on higher-mileage examples — points worth a pre-purchase inspection rather than a reason to avoid the model outright.

Celica itself comes from the Latin word coelica, meaning "heavenly" or "celestial" — a name Toyota kept across seven generations of the model from 1970 to 2006. The all-wheel-drive turbocharged variant, however, carried different names depending on where it was sold: GT-Four in Japan and most export markets, All-Trac Turbo in the United States, and Turbo 4WD in Canada and parts of Europe.

The GT-Four concept actually predates the production ST165. Toyota first used the name on a convertible prototype shown at the 1985 Tokyo Motor Show, built around the theme of "open air 4WD motoring." That convertible never reached production, but the GT-Four name and its underlying concept carried over to the liftback model that entered production in October 1986.

In the US, the same all-wheel-drive hardware was marketed under the All-Trac name — a system Toyota considered a genuine advance in bringing full-time four-wheel drive to mainstream consumer cars. All-Trac had actually launched in Japan under the GT-Four badge in 1986, but Toyota didn't bring the system to American showrooms under the All-Trac name until 1988, creating a naming split that still causes confusion for buyers cross-shopping listings from different regions today.

Pinning down a single "market value" for the ST205 is harder than for more common JDM homologation cars, largely because so few of them exist in any given market to set a consistent price trend. What the available data does make clear is the direction of travel: scarcity, not headline power figures, is what drives the car's current desirability.

The UK registration numbers make the scarcity concrete. Only around 300 ST205s were ever sold new in Britain, and just 30 remain registered there today — a decline to under a tenth of the fleet that existed as recently as 2001. Cars that do surface for sale are frequently marketed around specific rarity claims, such as unusual factory colors accounting for a small single-digit percentage of total production, rather than around outright performance credentials.

Launch pricing offers a useful floor for thinking about relative value. At £29,235 in 1994, the ST205 cost roughly £5,000 more than a Ford Escort Cosworth and nearly £10,000 more than a Subaru Impreza Turbo — positioning it as a premium option even against other homologation-bred rally rivals when new. That price gap, combined with the car never having been sold new in North America, means most examples reaching US buyers today arrive through grey-market import channels once they clear the 25-year import threshold, which adds compliance and logistics costs on top of the purchase price itself.

Buyers should also factor in the Super Strut suspension's maintenance profile when weighing long-term value: its components are increasingly scarce and expensive to replace, which affects running costs in a way that doesn't show up in a simple purchase-price comparison against more conventionally suspended rivals like the Impreza or Evo.

There isn't a direct successor to the ST205 in the way the ST205 succeeded the ST185. When Toyota moved to the seventh-generation Celica, the company dropped the all-wheel-drive GT-Four model entirely — the new car had no equivalent turbocharged AWD variant at all. That makes the ST205 the final chapter of a drivetrain lineage that began with the 1985 Tokyo Motor Show convertible concept and ran through three production generations and 30 rally wins.

For current owners and restorers, the car's condition issues are well documented and fairly consistent across sources. The 3S-GTE's tuning headroom — 360 hp without touching the internals — makes it an attractive base for enthusiasts, but the factory ECU's limitations mean serious builds require a replacement unit rather than a simple remap. On the chassis side, the Super Strut front suspension is the defining maintenance challenge: it delivers the sharp front-end response that owners rate above the ST165 and ST185, but replacement parts are getting harder to find and more expensive as the car ages.

Routine pre-purchase checks that recur across owner and forum advice include:

- Pulling the dipstick to check for blow-back indicating ring-land failure.
- Inspecting differential mounts for play and listening for clunking under load.
- Checking for rust across the body and undercarriage, generally cosmetic rather than structural.
- Verifying cooling system health, given reports of the 3S-GTE running hot when the water pump or radiator aren't in top condition.

With roughly 2,500 homologation-spec cars built worldwide (and a disputed higher total-production figure of 10,469 depending on source), a UK fleet down to 30 registered examples, and no factory-built replacement for its drivetrain, the ST205 sits at the point where restoration and preservation matter more than routine ownership.

The Toyota Celica GT-Four ST205 (1994–1999) was the third and final generation of Toyota's WRC homologation-special Celica, built at the Tahara plant in Japan with rally preparation handled by Toyota Team Europe in Cologne. It used a 2.0-liter 3S-GTE turbo four producing up to 255 PS in JDM trim, a full-time all-wheel-drive system with a Torsen rear LSD, and a distinctive front "Super Strut Suspension" design. Its WRC career ended in controversy in 1995, when a hidden turbo-restrictor device was discovered at Rally Catalunya, costing Toyota a manufacturers' disqualification and a season-long ban despite the device drawing praise from FIA President Max Mosley. Production figures are disputed — roughly 2,500 homologation-spec units versus a cited 10,469 total worldwide — but regional scarcity is clear: only 300 reached Europe new, and just 30 remain registered in the UK today. Never officially sold in North America, the ST205 also marked the end of the GT-Four line, since the following Celica generation dropped all-wheel drive entirely. Today it survives mainly through dedicated owners managing known weak points — Super Strut parts scarcity, differential wear, and cooling issues — on a car with no direct factory successor.