The look on J.R. Todd's face spoke volumes about the new Toyota Supra GR Funny Car he's driving this season.

It's not that the Toyota Camry was a bad car; it's just the new Toyota Supra GR is that good.

"I've been dying, like a kid on Christmas Eve, to get it," Todd said. "Making some laps there in West Palm a month ago with it, that was nice just to get the feel for it, then go to Phoenix and Pomona to put it to the test."

Todd drove the Supra to the eighth quickest qualifying position and reached the quarter-finals in Pomona. In Phoenix testing, Todd ran a best 3.866 elapsed time, at 334.32 miles per hour out of the box.

"That's one of my better runs in a Funny Car, Period," Todd admits. "It definitely gives us good confidence and a sign of things to come in the future with this new Toyota Supra GR. But my biggest thing is the visibility with it. Not that there was anything wrong with the Camry. We just wanted to make it better than what we had."

One of the major improvements on the new Toyota Supra GR is visibility. A driver who can see better also races better.

"That's where my input came in," Todd added. "I wanted to be able to see better than what I was able to out of the Camry. And I feel like we definitely accomplished that with this new body. And comparing the two, the way I can see, I almost compare it to driving a dragster. That's how much better you can see out the car.

"I don't want to say I was guessing when I was driving the Camry, but you had to wait for it to get up on the tire to really see where you were on the track. This thing, I can see pretty much straight down the track, just sitting there on the start line. So that means a lot to me. And it's crucial. A lot of these tracks we go to have narrow grooves; you have to keep them stuck down the center that groove as best you can, which is not easy at all in a funny car. So I think that's going to, in turn, help me just a better driver."

While many of today's Funny Cars have a minimal resemblance to the production car, the Toyota Supra GR might be the closest since the 1980s, pre-Batmobile era Funny Cars.

From the time he sat in his street-driven Toyota Supra GR, Todd knew the folks, if they followed this design, had a winner with this car. Indeed, they did.

"I got my personal GR Supra beginning of the spring last year. So that's a fun little hot rod to drive around town, and you don't see too many of them," Todd said. "It's funny. Young kids, old guys, it doesn't matter. It catches their attention. You pull up to a stoplight; they're waving at you. And I've had people pull up next to me, going down the interstate with a GoPro camera, hanging out the window, videoing me driving down the highway, which I thought was pretty funny. But it's definitely a looker.

"I feel like the styling from the streetcar; they took it over to the Funny Car. In my opinion, I think it's the only car out here that resembles what it's supposed to look like."

While some manufacturers might go one level up on their design, Todd believes Toyota has taken multiple levels up with the Supra.

"I feel like we were doing really well with what we have with the Toyota Camry, and it was almost a 10-year-old design," Todd said. "We're not going to get a tenth on the competition, but it's going to get us, I feel, to the next level where we need to be to compete with JFR, the Dodge bodies, and the Fords. Not that we are that far behind, but hopefully, this gets us right with them, or even a little ahead of them. Just looking at it, I'd say it's definitely three notches up from where we were.