Drag race: Mercedes-AMG A45 S vs Toyota Supra GTS

You may consider this a forgone conclusion. All-wheel drive trumps rear-wheel drive at the dragstrip, right? And even though Toyota has just updated the Supra GTS with an additional 35kW for a total output of 285kW, that’s still less than the 310kW the Mercedes-AMG A45 packs from its 2.0-litre turbo four.

So naturally, the A45 wins. Actually, not so fast…

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Although the A45 might seem to hold an advantage on paper, in the real world this Drag Battle was much closer than anticipated. But before we get into how they performed, we must first explain the logic of racing this pair in the first place, given their obvious differences.

What connects these two is price. At just under $100,000 ($95K for the AMG and $97K for the Supra) this pairing represents two of the most exciting performance cars you can buy before your spend tips beyond the six figure mark.

And while their performance philosophies are quite different, the level of performance on offer is actually quite similar. The A45 might hold a traction and power advantage, but the Supra is 130kg lighter and has the benefit of two extra cylinders and a further litre of capacity.

As usual we raced the cars through a number of tests. First up, we ran each car individually to extract the quickest times possible before putting them head-to-head in a best-of-three drag race using launch control.

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Then things started to get really interesting. While the A45 held a slight advantage due to its superior launch control system, racing the cars without launch control levelled the playing field. It was even closer in the two ‘rolling race’ runs, where we first tested each car’s response and in-gear acceleration in Comfort mode and then in Race/Sport.

Our video finishes with a brake test, where we complete a full emergency stop in each car from 100km/h to zero to see which one pulls up in the shorter distance.

For the full breakdown of how each car performed in each discipline, give the above video a watch. And don’t forget to tell us what cars you’d like to see us put head-to-head in our next Drag Battle. We’ll be shooting more of these videos and want your suggestions!

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