Month: January 2009 (Page 2 of 4)

Motoharu Kurosawa reunited with a Hakosuka Skyline on Fuji Speedway

January 24, 2009 / banpei / 1 Comment

Jalopnik posted an item about a Hakosuka Skyline racing one lap on Fuji Speedway. Little did they know about the driver nor his history with the Hakosuka. :(

The driver is Motoharu “gan-san” Kurosawa who is a regular on Best motoring. Motoharu Kurosawa has a long racing career, but most of his career he was a factory driver for Nissan and Honda. So of course he raced the Hakosuka during its glory years!

Here you can see the (narrated) Best Motoring video of him being reunited with the Hakosuka on Fuji Speedway:

I also found old footage of him doing the same, but then back in 1970, so about 38 years before the video above:

In this second video he’s clearly doing a show run for television, so he’s not going flat out. Also note that the road of Fuji Speedway used to be much bumpier than nowadays!

Hilarious: Masato Shimon complete collection

January 23, 2009 / banpei / 2 Comments

Masato Shimon is a singer who sung a lot of intros for Japanese movie and tv-series during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Someone decided that it would be a very good idea to actually collect all of them, glue them together and put them on Youtube.

At first I thought it was a very nice thing to do, but shortly after I started with the first movie I came to the conclusion that the guy did a lot of Tokusatu (read: Power Rangers like action heroes), starting with the Kamen Rider. After seeing the third movie intro for Kamen Rider (after seeing all the tv series in between) it became hilarious! :D

Collection #1: The Kamen Rider collection:

One funny thought came up to me: During the early 70s, after Kamen Rider was aired, the B?s?zoku started dressing up their motorbikes like the one Kamen Rider drives. Motorcycle gangs imitating a righteous cruisader! Now that’s funny!

Collection #2: Early anime (ninja, baseball, etc.)and some more Tokusatu:

I love the special effects of the Ultraman intro. Especially the part with the parachuted godzilla-like monster!
Anyone got an idea what the apes are about?? :?

Collection #3: Kungfu, anime and more Tokusatu:

I like the English version of Ultra Seven! :D
And the last one with the helicopter coming out of the head is simply hilarious!!

Had enough? :P

Carina Sightings: unknown wrecked Carina TA60 sedan

January 21, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

Another Carina Sighting from Flickr:

Unknown wrecked Carina sedan

Since the majority of the Carina sedans were all 2T engined I presume this is also a TA60 sedan. Since it’s got no headrests in the rear bench it is the same grade as mine: DX. Unfortunately there is no licenseplate so we can’t even guess where the car is from… A lot of guesswork here…

Anyway, the car has been wrecked: it got a good bump on the front and left fender and the right rear got a small dent as well. The interior looks like the car has been driven by the Swamp Thing himself. It probably wasn’t saved after these three pictures…

Would it have been in an accident or did a wannabe drifter loose control of the car when loosing traction (open diff!) on a muddy road?

RS Wantanabe wheel advertisement

January 20, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

Came across this nice advertisement of the RS Wantanabe on Youtube:

It features a Nissan (Datsun) Bluebird 910 coupe driving a rally and the wheels are the famous 8 spoke RS (Racing Service) Wantanabe rims, which we all know from Initial D. ;)

Nice to see those rims being advertised back in the 80s!

Tilt-shift style photos

January 19, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

Everybody must have made model kits and made pictures of those model kits as well. So, you know that extreme close pictures make the sharp-depth of your pictures worse and about half of your model kit looks blurred. Actually the same can happen when you take extreme closeups of your children (like Olivér for instance ;) ) and half of their face is blurred.

Well, thanks to IZ Reloaded I found this great website which can do that effect for every photo you have!! :)

Tilt-shifted photo of Revolver Drift’s Carina AA63 Coupe

As you can see Revolver Drift’s Carina AA63 Coupe almost looks like a real scale model now!

Tilt-shifted photo of the AE86-es at the AEU86 meeting in Limburg

And I did the same for this great photograph at the AEU86 meeting in Limburg. It really looks like it was set on some scalemodel environment in this picture!

You can try it yourself here:
Tiltshift Maker

Hilarious: Densha de D (Initial D with trains)

January 19, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

A couple of months ago I was browsing through a page which mentioned several Initial D spoofs (dojinshi) and one of them was Densha de D. I found a video on Youtube which shows the first chapter with some wellknown music under it:

Densha de Go is a famous game which is a train simulator, so basically Initial D is the drift simulator equivalent. Like you can use a steering wheel to control your drifts with Initial D you can use a train lever with Densha de Go to control your train! ;)

As you by now have read the manga is about train drivers who compete with each other. Takumi is driving a very old train and beats the modern train driven by Keisuke. In the end you can also see who drives which trains in the following episodes, and believe me: they fit very well!!

Some train freaks (Densha otaku?) re-created the Densha de D on their model trains:

Funny that is is quite possible with some practice. :)