New-Generation

One of the most talked-about cars to appear at collector car auctions early this year was a frumpy Toyota family sedan, a 1966 four-door Corona that had been purchased in 1970 by Frank Kenney, one of the first Toyota dealers in the state of Washington. After paying $800 to buy the barely driven sedan from an elderly Seattle woman, he used the car as a showroom display rather than resell it.

Frank Kenney’s son, Jerome, joked that some day he would drive the pastel blue Corona to his father’s funeral, and did just that when his father died last August. Its duty fulfilled, he consigned the beautifully preserved Toyota to the Silver Auction sale in Fort McDowell, Ariz., in January. Its odometer showed just 8,768 miles.

For a nondescript econocar, the Corona caused a minor sensation. Many auctiongoers had never seen a Toyota from the 1960s. No wonder — a lack of rustproofing assured a survival rate for those early Toyotas that was only slightly better than that of a passenger pigeon. The bidding quickly sailed past the reserve of $12,000, and when the hammer fell, it had reached $16,740.

Interest in sportier Toyota models has also been growing. Joji Luz lives in the epicenter of the nascent Japanese collector car market — Southern California — and his enthusiasm for the Toyota marque is more typical of what you might expect to encounter at a Porsche or Corvette club meeting. Mr. Luz, who grew up in Manila, discovered the thrift and durability of Toyotas when his father’s taxi fleet changed over to the Japanese imports.

Today, Mr. Luz owns 12 vintage Toyotas, including the fifth and 13th Celicas made, and he’s aware of virtually every early Celica that comes on the market in California. Mr. Luz pegs the value of a stock, well-restored 1971-72 Celica at around $12,000. They can bring thousands more if modified with the dual-cam engine that was fitted to cars sold in the Japanese market.

The Celica was among the first Japanese entries into the sporty personal car market; a Liftback version showed a marked resemblance to a scaled-down 1967 Mustang. In stock form, the first-generation Celica (1970-77) was a modest performer. Most road tests reported 0-to-60 acceleration times for the Celica from 11 to 13 seconds, about the same as an MGB or Fiat Spider of the era.

But the Celica could outhandle both of those sports cars. Road & Track’s review of a 1974 Celica GT reported that the Toyota was quicker through a slalom course than any other car it had tested except one — a Ferrari Dino.

The Celica also had enormous potential for hot-rodding. Janet Guthrie, an aspiring racecar driver who would become the first woman to compete in the Indianapolis 500, purchased a 1972 Celica — the first new car she had ever owned — and proceeded to take it apart and turn it into a racecar. She raced the car 51 times from 1973-75. In the car’s final race under her ownership, Ms. Guthrie passed 20 cars in fewer than five laps to move into second place and on the final lap, passed an MGB for the win.

Robert Pass, a vintage car dealer in St. Louis, later owned the Guthrie Celica, racing it in the 1990s. “It was a delightful racecar,” he said. “Its handling was as neutral and pleasant as any Alfa Romeo.”

That statement might be considered heresy by traditional collectors. And there lies the rub with Japanese cars as collectibles: the old guard in the collector car world gives them no respect. A car like an early Celica, while stylish, well-built and as entertaining to drive as its contemporaries from Europe, has a hard time being taken seriously. Mr. Pass said that it boiled down to the perception that Japanese cars lacked the heritage and cachet of European cars.

ONE of the few automotive niches where Toyota does not yet have a strong presence is the collector car market. Fifty years after its first troubled attempts to bring cars to American roads, there are signs that this may be changing: quietly, and outside the usual collector car circles, a groundswell of interest in vintage Toyotas has been building.