Another day, another opponent faces the new Toyota Supra on the drag strip. This drag race is probably the most exciting of all involving the Japanese coupe so far and we bet you’ll agree with us after just a few minutes. For this chase, the Supra lines up against a Volkswagen Golf R. The folks over at Cars.co.za took delivery of the latest examples of the two performance cars and gathered them at the Killarney drag strip in Cape Town, South Africa for what is described as “a good old-fashioned quarter-mile drag race head-to-head shootout.”

Make no mistake – the new Supra is super fast. With a 3.0-litre turbocharged engine sourced from the new BMW Z4, the coupe has at least 335 bhp on tap. In reality, the power is even higher and this basically means the car is significantly more powerful than the Golf R. After the facelift, the most powerful iteration of the current generation hatchback from Wolfsburg comes with a 2.0-litre turbo TSI motor, generating 306 bhp. The difference between the two is one litre of displacement, two cylinders, and at least 29 bhp.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about drag races it’s that more power doesn’t always mean a victory. On paper, the Supra should be quicker from 0 to 60 miles per hour with a time of 4.1 seconds versus the Golf R’s time of 4.8 seconds. But that’s just on paper as the Golf has proved it’s actually faster than what Volkswagen says with times of 4.4-4.5 seconds for the 0-62 mph run. That makes the gap between the two really small and even a minor imperfection from the drivers on the starting line could decide the race. That's exactly the case here.