By: Jason Woosey
So you're prowling the streets and (sort of) minding your own business in Modified Maniac Mustang when some weirdo in a standard Camry pulls up next to you at the traffic lights and gives you a challenging glance.
Before you can get your smug face back into shape, the light turns green, there's a cloud of smoke and he's gone.
What? Didn't your mama ever warn you about sleepers?
[sleeper (n): Often referring to what appears to be an ordinary looking stock commuter car that is anything but stock under the hood. Pretty much the exact opposite of your every day riced up civic - Urban Dictionary.]
Toyota has just taken this term to the extreme with its Sleeper Camry that was unveiled to a bemused crowd at the Sema show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
On the outside it looks like any stock-standard suburban specimen built for transporting your 2.4 kids. Yet showgoers were shocked when the 'unveiling' act saw the car's body lift to reveal a tube-frame dragster chassis and menacing V8 engine.
Its 5.7-litre V8 comes from under the bonnet of a Toyota Tundra pick-up but Toyota's motorsports team beefed it up with a TRD supercharger, revised electronics and a wet nitrous system. The result is a 634kW extreme sleeper that can allegedly cover the quarter mile in just 9.8 seconds. Not bad for something that was built in just 11 weeks.
Even Toyota's marketing folk are blown away by the project as national manager Steve Appelbaum puts it: “The transformation from seemingly stock Camry to full-blown race car just shocks the senses. Chuck Wade and the team at Motorsports Technical Centre did a truly spectacular job executing the vision of this project.”