His Supra Got Stolen. So He Bought Another One and Built It Exactly Right.
Taj Turner's first MkIV Toyota Supra was stolen mid-build. Five years, a Stuhagen hybrid twin-turbo setup, and a full interior rebuild later, strangers still stop him at gas stations in the middle of nowhere to ask about it.
Taj Turner's obsession with cars started the way it did for a lot of enthusiasts of his generation — Knight Rider, Street Hawk, Dukes of Hazzard — but the moment that actually stuck came from a grocery-store magazine rack, where he spotted a copy of Lowrider as a kid. For the first time, the car wasn't a supporting character in someone else's story; it was the story. That led to an '85 Bonneville on wire wheels and Vogue tires, then a Honda Accord built up during the first Fast & Furious era, and eventually, by his mid-thirties and after what he describes as countless project cars "completed," a want for something from the golden era of Japanese performance — a platform with no real ceiling. He landed on a MkIV Toyota Supra.
He found one locally and started building toward a specific vision. Then it was stolen. Turner reported it to police and did his own investigating on the side, tracking down who had taken it, but without probable cause the case went nowhere and the car was never recovered. When the insurance payout arrived, he made a decision rather than just cashing a check: "They're not going to take that joy away from me."
The replacement was a one-owner, completely stock Supra, and Turner drove it exactly as Toyota built it before touching a single part — a deliberate pause before starting over on the same vision the first car never got to finish. The build that followed is deep. "I'll always give credit to Enrique down in L.A.," Turner says. "He has what most Supra owners would consider the most perfectly built Supra. He's the only other person that has the E88 BBS wheels on a Supra. The interior, from front to back, has all been replaced. Almost like if you were trying to make it the concept." A Ridox body kit, TRD rear skirts, new head and taillights, and HKS coilovers finish the exterior.
Under the hood: a rebuilt 2JZ bored slightly past 3.0 liters, running Stuhagen hybrid twins — GT28 turbochargers fitted in the stock housings — alongside a Lawrence Shipman custom brushless electric fan, an HKS exhaust and downpipe, and a list of Powerhouse Racing bolt-ons. "If you take it over 4,500 RPM, it acts like it wants to kill you, and I love it," Turner says. "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. If you want to be conservative, it'll just drive. But if you want to go all out, it'll meet you there."
What sticks with Turner most isn't the boost. "I have never owned a car that is more of a celebrity than this car," he says. "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. There's never a stoplight that I don't have to give someone a thumbs-up back." Filmmaker Paolo Lekai, who shot the car for Petrolicious in the redwood forests outside San Francisco, said he'd rarely seen a car draw the kind of attention Turner's Supra gets from complete strangers — on a Tuesday morning, miles from any car meet, Turner still got recognized and tagged on social media multiple times before lunch. Five years on from the theft that started the second build, that's the part of the story that outlasted the setback: not the horsepower figure, but the fact that a 1990s Toyota still stops traffic, literally, everywhere it goes.
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