The Toyota 88C-V was a

Group C Group C was a category of sports car racing introduced by the FIA in 1982 and continuing until 1993, with ''Group A'' for touring cars and ''Group B'' for GTs. It was designed to replace both Group 5 special production cars (closed top touri ...

sports prototype A sports prototype, sometimes referred to as simply a prototype, is a type of race car that is used in the highest-level categories of sports car racing. These purpose-built racing cars, unlike street-legal and production-based racing cars, are n ...

entered by

Toyota is a Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi, Japan. It was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda and incorporated on . Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, producing about 10 ...

in 1988. The race car has a top speed of , accelerates from in 3.8 seconds, produces at 8000 rpm and weighs . It is the successor to the

Toyota 88C The Toyota 88C was a racing car entered by Toyota from 1988 to 1989. It is the successor to the Toyota 87C and the predecessor to the Toyota 88C-V. Like other Toyota-powered sports prototypes of the era, it was designed and built by Dome. The ...

and the predecessor to the Toyota 89C-V. Like other Toyota-powered

s of the era, it was designed and built by Dome. The car was a new design, developed around the Toyota's R32V turbocharged

V8 engine A V8 engine is an eight-cylinder piston engine in which two banks of four cylinders share a common crankshaft and are arranged in a V configuration. The first V8 engine was produced by the French Antoinette company in 1904, developed and u ...

, which replaced the 88C's standard turbocharged

Inline-4 A straight-four engine (also called an inline-four) is a four-cylinder piston engine where cylinders are arranged in a line along a common crankshaft. The vast majority of automotive four-cylinder engines use a straight-four layout (with the e ...

. The 88C-V competed in the

All Japan Sports Prototype Championship The , abbreviated as JSPC, formed by the Japan Automobile Federation, was a domestic championship which took place in Japan for Group C and IMSA GTP prototype cars and also featured cars that were eligible for touring car racing in its earlier y ...

Racing history

All Japan Sports Prototype Championship

The 88C-V made its debut at the 1988 Fuji 500 miles with a single car entered for Geoff Lees,

Masanori Sekiya is a racing car driver, most famous for being the first Japanese driver to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in 1995. Sekiya drove in single-seaters in his early career, contesting the Japanese Formula 3000 Championship and Formula Nippon from 1987 ...

and

Keiichi Suzuki is a Japanese musician, singer, and record producer who co-founded the Moonriders, a group that became one of Japan's most innovative rock bands. He is known to audiences outside Japan for his musical contributions to the video games ''Mother'' ...

but wasn't able to finish the race due to mechanical problems.

World Sports-Prototype Championship

Two 88C-Vs participated in the Japanese round of the World Sports-Prototype Championship, counting also as last round of the 1988 JSPC. The 1000 km of Fuji allowed Toyota another chance to compete against European competitors since Le Mans. The two cars were able to finish but were the last cars classified.

References

{{Toyota Sportscar Racers Group C cars 88C-V