Toyota’s Pixar Tribute Hides An Incredible Detail Only True Cars Fans Will Spot
The FIA World Endurance Championship and Toyota have recreated the Pixar Cars scene where tuner cars mess with Lightning McQueen’s transporter, Mack, on the highway. The trailer carries the real No. 7 Toyota TR010 Hybrid that won the 2026 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the clip was made to hype Toyota’s home race, the 6 Hours of Fuji.
Toyota flipped the ending, so this Le Mans winner gets delivered to its race instead of getting lost. The tuner crew is packed with nods to the movie, but the blue GR Supra carries the one most viewers will miss.
Toyota Rebuilt The Cars Highway Heist With An All-Toyota Tuner Crew
The clip runs just over a minute and opens at night, with a cab-over truck hauling the TR010 Hybrid inside a glass-walled trailer. Four modified Toyotas pull up behind it: a GT86, a GR86, an A90 Supra, and a JZX100 Mark II. All four wear aggressive aero and neon underglow, and the Mark II even spits flames from its exhaust.
In the movie, the tuner gang of DJ, Boost, Wingo, and Snot Rod finds Mack dozing on the interstate. DJ lulls him to sleep with soft music while Boost and Wingo nudge him from lane to lane. When Snot Rod sneezes out a blast of flame, Mack jolts awake, and a sleeping McQueen rolls out of the trailer and ends up near Radiator Springs.
Toyota’s far better-behaved crew scans the trailer to identify the TR010 inside, and the truck’s navigation glitches and resets its destination to Fuji Speedway. The fire-breathing Mark II stands in for Snot Rod. With the video titled “The fast and the… car which won Le Mans,” the nod to the truck heist in The Fast and the Furious is hard to miss.
Why The Blue Supra Was Always The Right Car To Play DJ
Look closely at the blue GR Supra’s rear windshield, and you’ll spot a sound-level meter. It’s an easy detail to miss at highway speed, but it points straight to DJ, the tuner gang’s music man. In Cars, DJ is painted blue from nose to tail and packed with a big spoiler, subwoofers, and speakers, along with a huge sound meter, also at the same spot.
The Supra also takes over DJ’s job in the heist, cutting in front of the truck and sending the signal that reroutes it to Fuji. That mirrors how DJ pulled ahead of Mack and put him to sleep with soothing music. The rest of the crew handles the scouting, but the Supra is the car that pulls off the job. It just goes to show the extent of attention to detail that went into a two-minute-long promo–it is simply incredible.
DJ’s design is based on a 2004 Scion xB, even though the film gives him a fictional model name. Scion was Toyota’s youth-focused brand in the US until 2016, and in Japan, the same boxy car wore a Toyota badge as the bB. By casting a Toyota as DJ, the FIA WEC handed the role back to the company whose car inspired it in the first place.
Unlike Lightning McQueen, Toyota’s Le Mans Winner Made It To Its Race
The No. 7 TR010 Hybrid earned its starring role at Le Mans in June, where Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi, and Nyck de Vries won by just 10.913 seconds after 381 laps. The #20 BMW M Hybrid V8 finished second, and the sister #8 Toyota came home third. It was Toyota’s sixth overall Le Mans win, which ties Bentley, and its first since 2022.
Neither Toyota made the final round of qualifying, so the pair started 14th and 15th. Technical director David Floury later revealed that the winning car also battled an intermittent sensor problem that pushed it into a safe mode, costing it up to 5 mph at the top end. Even so, the No. 7 fought through and ended Ferrari’s three-year Le Mans winning streak.
Unlike McQueen, this Le Mans winner reached its destination and went on display at Fuji, while two other TR010s raced. The #8 car of Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley, and Ryo Hirakawa won from eighth on the grid, thanks to a late call to take fuel only under the final safety car. The result was Toyota’s 10th Fuji win and stretched its manufacturers’ championship lead to 23 points.
Source: FIA WEC via YouTube
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