Actually, if you used a large core intercooler, and mounted it secure to the front, as long as both frame rails are still tied by a stout pipe, or what's left of the stock reinforcement bar, it should work fine.
The re-bar is there to keep your frame rails aligned, and to transfer impact to the rails that are designed to fold up, and trade heat for stored energy in a crash. (IE: You bend them, and that takes energy/heat, which is dissapated slow enough to keep you alive since YOU are not being asked to transfer that same energy... It's the fast energy transfer in your body that kills you. Your brain smashes up into your skull. Your organs smash up into your rib cage. Basicly, you die when your body slows down to fast.)
OK, so why would your large FMIC help? Well, it's pretty soft stuff. and if you hit a solid object, it's going to crush.. And that crush absorbs energy.. Energy that YOU now do not have to. (If that makes sense.)
What goes wrong on so many "modified" cars is they pull all the heavy impact bars, and much of the structure from the car.. and then put a roll cage in the middle.
This totally screws up what "crush zone" you had designed into the car, and makes the energy transfer to the driver that much more deadly.
I've seen more than a few "Muscle" cars with cages that extend into the crush zones on the car. Deadly when done that way. The extra pipe and metal makes it that much less likely to fold up on impact, so little, or at least less energy is absorbed, and then they wonder why the driver died from internal injuries?
Modern cars are so safe because they manage energy transfer so well. The Supra in any form is a stout car for the year it was built in, and the MK3 especially was overbuilt as they knew the Targa top versions would make it weak in the middle, so they had to beef up the floor pan, rails and rocker panels. (And there are specific parts on the Targa cars not found on the hardtops, part of the reason they are lighter, they have less metal in them, especially in the rockers and inner structure.)
Sorry about the long post, but this is what I do for a living.
