After years of rumours followed by concept cars, spy photos, brochure leaks, the release of production specs and – finally – first drives of the long-awaited GT 86, sources in Japan say Toyota has experienced a sudden change of heart and ‘literally can’t be bothered’ to build the already-announced sports car.

‘We used to be really into this,’ said an anonymous Toyota insider. ‘But then we had a meeting to decide between the GT 86 and a facelift for the Avensis and I think we all surprised ourselves with just how much we’d all rather concentrate on the Avensis. So that’s what we’re doing. Sorry’.

Toyota’s sudden volte-face might sound like bad news for Subaru, their partner in the rear-drive sports car project. ‘Actually, we’re not bothered at all,’ said a senior Subarist. ‘Frankly, we went off the whole idea ages ago. A Subaru coupe with no turbos or four-wheel-drive? We must have been mental to sign that off. We were going to tell Toyota that we’d lost the designs or something but now they’re not bothered either, we can scrap the whole thing and get back to making a series of saloons and estates that don’t quite look right. Sorry.’

Subaru’s stance was reiterated by our Toyot-o-mole. ‘It’s important for us to get back to our roots,’ he explained. ‘Unfortunately, our roots are making extremely ordinary saloon cars rather than acting as a sort of masturbatory aid for helmsmiths. Sorry.’

The book is called A Top Gear Christmas and it’s packed full of all the usual bollocks you’d expect from the world’s favourite programme that used to be about cars including Clarkson’s opinion powered hot air balloon, Hammond’s guide to cooking for Brummies, May’s disastrous stint as a department store Santa, a whole cartoon strip based on The Interceptors thing that was on the TV this year and much, much more.

You can buy it from the nice people at Amazon by making with the click, here.

For the first time, Sniff Petrol can reveal that we were given exclusive access to the ashtray during a top secret Toyota test session back in May. This was very much a development ashtray and key details such as the lift-out insert and the underneath bit were kept under wraps but we were permitted to play with the lid a couple of times and we can report that it had a crisp, short travel action and felt highly responsive. The ashtray engineers were keen to stress that they still had work to do on the texture of the lid but on the evidence we saw it seemed to be quite nice, even though we weren’t allowed to look at it directly.

Meanwhile Subaru, the lead development partner in the FT-86 project, has let slip some tantalising details about the door pockets that will be fitted to its version of the exciting new coupe. A spokesman claimed that these pockets will be slightly more accommodating than those fitted to Toyota’s version of the car and will be capable of taking ‘just under one bottle of water, a sunglasses case and a load of old sticky parking tickets that have gone a bit curly’.

Toyota is not saying anything about its car’s door pockets but has promised that next week it will reveal some exclusive details concerning the FT-86’s upper seat belt mounting point adjustment knob. A Toyota spokesman later denied that his company was revealing the FT-86 ‘too slowly’ and that there was ‘no need’ for them to stop pissing about and just show us the fucking car.