After Thieves Took His First Supra, He Spent Five Years Building the Second One Right
Taj Turner's MkIV Toyota Supra project began with a stolen car and an insurance check — and turned into a five-year build that still stops strangers in the redwoods.
Taj Turner's relationship with the Toyota Supra MkIV did not begin the way most build features do. It began with a theft. Turner had found a JZA80 locally and was in the middle of assembling his vision for the car when it was stolen. He reported it to police, then did his own digging and identified the person who had taken it — but without probable cause, investigators told him they couldn't take the case further. The car never came back.
What came next, as documented by filmmaker Paolo Lekai for Petrolicious in a piece published June 19, 2026, was not a story about giving up. Turner took the insurance payout from the stolen car and bought a second Supra: a one-owner, completely stock example. Before he touched a single panel, he drove it exactly as Toyota built it. "They're not going to take that joy away from me," he said of the decision to start over. It took five years to turn that second car into the one he'd originally set out to build.
The mechanical work reflects a Supra guy going all-in on the platform's ceiling-less reputation. Under the hood sits a rebuilt, slightly bored-out 3.0-liter head and block paired with Stuhagen hybrid twin GT28 turbochargers running in the stock housings, an HKS exhaust and downpipe, a custom brushless electric fan built by Lawrence Shipman, and a run of Powerhouse Racing bolt-ons. Turner described the character that combination gives the car in blunt terms: "If you take it over 4,500 RPM, it acts like it wants to kill you, and I love it. But if I want to just take it to Napa with my lady and take off the targa top and just go wine tasting, it'll be very tame."
Outside, the build is anchored by a Ridox body kit, TRD rear skirts, HKS coilovers, and a set of E88 BBS wheels that Turner says only one other Supra he knows of — built by a friend in Los Angeles he credits as "Enrique down in L.A." — also wears. The interior was redone front to back. Turner talks about the whole package less like a mod list and more like a restoration of intent: getting the car as close as possible to the vision he had before it was taken from him the first time.
Lekai's piece, shot over a day in the redwood forests outside San Francisco, spends as much time on the reaction to the car as the car itself. Turner was recognized and tagged on social media roughly six times during a single Tuesday shoot in the middle of nowhere, including once while he was inside a restaurant bathroom. It's a detail Lekai uses to make a broader point about the MkIV Supra's place in enthusiast culture — a car that, for a certain generation, was as much a poster and a video-game icon as it was a piece of machinery, and one that still draws a crowd three decades after Toyota stopped building it.
Turner's own read on the ownership experience, quoted directly in the piece, gets at why he was willing to spend five years rebuilding what he'd already lost once: "I have never owned a car that is more of a celebrity than this car. It doesn't matter what vehicle is in front of me, behind me, next to me. No one goes crazy the way they go crazy for a Supra."
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