The 2014 Detroit Auto Show is underway and Toyota is taking it by storm. Today it released the FT-1 concept car, and all I can say is “wow.” This is a car that makes me have inappropriate thoughts.

Developed the Toyota’s Calty design studio and pitched to head honcho Akio Toyoda himself, the FT-1 represents the future of Toyota design. Akio Toyoda wants to build cars that make people say “I want this … I HAVE to drive this!”

In fact FT-1 stands for “Future Toyota One”. Okay, so the name isn’t great, but if this is the future of Toyota sign me up.

According to head designer Alex Shen, “Function Sculpting” was at the heart of the design. The words might just be so much design clap-trap, but the result is that this car looks like it is ready to drive off the plinth and do a blistering track time.

The proportions are absolutely classic sports car. I love that the hood is two-thirds of the length, and that the driver is almost sitting on top of the rear wheels. This thing just looks mean … and fast. In fact, from the side, the FT-1 reminds me of an SRT Viper and – trust me – that’s a good thing.

The front looks like it gets its inspiration from a Formula One car, with its aggressive protuberant nose. But its not all race car futurism, the headlights and the sweep back up the hood to a glass engine cover, are all classic sports car lines. It’s a stunning combination of aggression and sensuous style. And on this car the promise of speed doesn’t look to be an idle boast.

On the interior, the cockpit is surprisingly down to earth and focused for a concept, reinforcing the feeling that this is no mere show car. You get fancy touches like a heads up display and a steering wheel that has been hosed down with buttons, but mostly you get a racing driving position with excellent fields of vision.

Sitting here writing, I can’t tell you how much I want to drive this thing. I am willing this car to be the next Toyota Supra so hard my eyes are about to start bleeding. And there is hope that my mental anguish might not be for naught, because we know that Toyota and BMW are planning on building a joint sports car. Can it please look like this?

To get a taste of what the FT-1 is like, we don’t even have to wait that long because starting to tomorrow the car will be available for download in Gran Turismo 6. In fact the final part of the pitch by the design team to Mr. Toyoda was getting him to drive the FT-1 on his PS4, once he beat his real life time in a Lexus LFA he was sold.

Its all because this car is the epitome of Toyota’s new design philosophy: Waku Doki. Literally translated it means a palpable heart-pounding sense of excitement. After seeing the FT-1, I prefer to use a slightly more American spin: YEEEE-HAH!k

What Is It?
Toyota FT-1 Concept

What's New About This Model?
The Toyota FT-1 Concept is a design study of a flagship high-performance sports car. It was designed by Toyota's California-based design studio, Calty Design Research.

When Does It Go on Sale?
There are no plans to put the FT-1 into production, though Toyota's current sports car range could easily accommodate such a vehicle. Today the company's sole sports car is the entry-level Scion FR-S. Its supercar, the Lexus LFA, is no longer in production, leaving room in the automaker's lineup for a successor, or a less-expensive, Supra-like vehicle.

What Configuration Does It Have?
The FT-1 is a four-seat, front-engine, rear-wheel-drive sports car. Surprisingly, no hybrid hardware was mentioned, so this is apparently a purists' sports car with a focus on light weight. A trendy transparent engine cover reveals the engine, which remains of unknown provenance.

As the FT-1 sports 2+2 seating, a Toyota badge (and not a Lexus badge) and looks capable of housing an inline six-cylinder power plant, the FT-1 is highly suggestive of a latter-day Supra. The BMW-Toyota sports car collaboration announced in late December leads to tantalizing speculation. It's not too hard to imagine BMW's proven, powerful inline-6 taking residence in the FT-1's engine bay.

Which Cars Influenced Its Styling?
Hints of the iconic Toyota 2000GT can be seen in the shape of the FT-1's side glass and curvaceous side elements, while the wraparound windshield was inspired by the Lexus FT-HS concept from 2007. The nose's central protrusion and prominent ducting recall pure motorsport cars like Toyota's TS030 LMP1 endurance racecar. Look closely and you can see the Scion FR-S and Lexus LFA in the car's general proportions.

Toyota's withdrawal from Formula 1 racing in 2009 might explain why no explicit links to F1 were mentioned, though the inspiration for the rear foglight is unmistakable.

Why Did Toyota Build It?
Acknowledging the company's previous consensus-based, low-risk design approach, the FT-1 represents a far more passion-oriented philosophy for Toyota. It is intended to set the tone for the company's future design projects, which promise to be bolder than past efforts.

What Does It Look Like in Person?
The Toyota FT-1 is one of those cars that really needs to be seen in the metal in order to appreciate the full impact of its form. It's truly stunning with the benefit of the third dimensions. This is not a sprawling, massive supercar: rather it looks shrink-wrapped and taut, compact but not toylike. Drown in retro it does not, as the FT-1's nods to the past are subtly and cleanly integrated and the styling confidently goes its own way.

I Want To Drive It, but How?
On January 14 Toyota will make the FT-1 available on Gran Turismo 6 for the Sony PlayStation. It's said to be faster than the LFA around Fuji Speedway in the hands of Akio Toyoda, Toyota's president.

A pencil tip moves across a sheet of paper, leaving a thin graphite line. Perhaps a millimeter across, it could be swiftly erased. Or it could become the spark for the greatest performance cars that have ever existed: perhaps Marcello Gandini's 1966 Lamborghini Miura. Or Jean Bugatti's 1937 Type 57 SC Atlantic Coupe. Very different designs, but both born of a mere line arcing across paper.

For Alex Shen, studio chief designer at Toyota's Calty Design Research in Newport Beach, California, the words describing the sports car's styling concept came first -- words like "sexy," "honest," "organic," "kick-***." Followed by proportions -- front/mid-engine, rear drive, just the right scale. And a wild guess at price -- maybe $60,000? "It's a Toyota," says Shen. "It ought to be affordable." Only then did lines start to appear.

But when they did, it was an avalanche. Virtually every designer in the 65-person studio submitted sketches, hundreds of them, many drawn at night, some sketched on lunchtime napkins, altogether exploding the number of lines Calty's president, Kevin Hunter, and Shen's team slowly culled for the very best ideas. At least the hurricane of lines that would become their sports car was now just a flurry.

Let me back up here. Usually, when people draw cars, they're actually creating an outline, which in drawing parlance is a contour line -- delineating the "contour" between the positive space (the car) and the negative space (the emptiness around it). In the realm of car designers, the language differs; for them, the line's a "silhouette." A contour is applied across a surface to understand its shape. For Shen, though, it would be a challenge for his silhouette not to recall that of the Mark

The canted roofline creates visual stress without unbalancing the overall shape.

4 Toyota Supra. It's iconic: a long, melted nose, abrupt windshield rise, tight roof peak, and lengthy plunge to a mini ducktail flip. And it was a line Shen and his colleagues simultaneously embraced and struggled to resist. Their task was to create a Toyota sports car for the future, a point emphasized by its eventual name, "FT-1" -- for Future Toyota-One -- which recalls their stillborn 2007 FT-HS project and parallels Lexus' "LF" (Lexus Future) naming scheme. The FT-1, set to debut at the North America International Auto Show, is not a "real car," but a "concept car" -- a three-dimensional frenzy of winks and side glances, sucking scoops, and brutal downforce-generators, all peeking at us from behind a curtain where the future is being created. It's the essence of a potent potential new sports car that's for now an instant of bodywork turbulence, shock-frozen in fiberglass.

When Calty pitched its plan to Toyota's Nagoya headquarters, its timing couldn't have been better. At the 2011 Tokyo auto show, Akio Toyoda had insisted, "Now we have a new slogan, 'Fun To Drive Again.'" And he'd made no secret of wanting a Supra-like car restored to the lineup. Calty was wise to the pitfalls, too, having been down this particular road five years earlier with its hybrid-drive, Supra-esque FT-HS, a car stillborn during the freefall of the great recession. But with the world economy healing and Toyota's helm in the hands of a guy who'd donned a helmet to drive in the Nürburgring 24-hour race, the starter button was firmly pushed. With Akio's blessing, Calty's in-house Supra-esque sports car got the green light to become a concept car to be judged by the world. A timeline was plotted, milestones marked. The team set to work.

Unlike the Supra, the FT-1 has racing fingerprints all over it. The wind is shat- tered by a prow dominated by a Formula 1-inspired beak. Consequently, the radia- tor's air is divided between twin shark-like mouths, each stuffed with electric fans sitting atop angled splitters whose shape is repeated higher up via streaking light signatures that fishhook around intense, triple-LED headlights.

Moving aft, its flanks are deeply slashed by even more air intakes that are themselves subsequently engulfed by rising rocker panels that suddenly erupt into muscular rear wheel arches. The roof is a sort of double-bubble, and the frenzy stays nonstop all the way to a tail that reminds you of a prototype sports racing car's, complete with Venturi tunnel openings, a dense array of 35 tiny LED foglights, extendable wing, and twin storm- drain exhausts. None of this is by accident. During the FT-1's gestation, Calty (involved in shaping Toyota's Camry NASCAR racer) frequently consulted nearby Toyota Racing Development to ensure its shape was consistent with a sports car's engineering demands. The result is called "functional sculpting."

Red, which emphasizes highlights, was the only color ever considered.

Classic "silhouette cars" -- ones you'd be inclined to draw in outline -- are typically relaxed, simple fuselage forms that tran- quilly speak to you through their broad pools of subtly reflected light. Think of the soft, slightly balloon-ish shapes from the '50s and '60s -- a particularly good example for me being the Lancia Aurelia B20.On the other hand, "gesture" in drawing puts an emphasis on the action and vitality. A good (or bad) example of gesture is the 1984 Ferrari Testarossa, a very, very busy design. Draw it, and your pencil becomes animated trying to capture the long strakes across its mammoth side-radiator gills. Recently, this sort of hyperactive, big-sculpture automotive design seems to be reemerging: the new Corvette, anyone? The FT-1's extreme gesture mixes positive and negative space even more turbulently; somehow, it's both windswept and forward-leaning.

The Toyota FT-1 concept may have been unveiled just a few hours ago, but you could get behind of the wheel of our newest sports car as soon as tomorrow!
The FT-1 will be made a playable car in the Playstation 4 game Gran Turismo 6 within 24 hours of its launch at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.