Month: March 2012 (Page 1 of 3)

Lots of JDM classics in 1Q84!

March 28, 2012 / banpei / 2 Comments

As you may have noticed I haven’t been posting much lately. The main reason for this is because I’ve been selected as a presenter at the Percona Live MySQL conference in Santa Clara on April 12th. This takes a lot of preparation so I literally have no spare time left till the conference is over.

In the meanwhile one of the preparations was to buy a book for the 11 hour flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco and as Haruki Murakami already is one of my favorite writers I chose his latest book called 1Q84 to be the best choice. Murakami is renowned for his tremendous amount of details in his writing and I’m sure this book certainly won’t disappoint me.

I could not resist reading the first chapter and already starts great for a JDM classic fanatic like me: in the first chapter it gets clear that the setting in 1984 and the main character is in a traffic jam. The following cars get mentioned:
1. Toyota Crown Royal Saloon (probably MS120 as it is the new model)
2. Nissan Pajero
3. Suzuki Alto (probably SS40)
4. black Toyota Celica (hopefully a AA63 or TA63 ;) )
So you can guess this really is mind blowing for me: just picturing all these late Showa cars being queued on the Tokyo Expressway 3. Just had to share this joy and recommend reading this book.

Hoshino Impul Silvia Super Silhouette race car

Commercial time: the Hoshino twins drive Silvias!

March 26, 2012 / banpei / 1 Comment

Back in 1982 Kazuyoshi Hoshino was the star of the Grand Championships around Japan: he both competed within the long distance Group C races and also in the more popular Group 5 (aka Super Silhouette) races where he drove his Hoshino Impul Silvia:

Two races on the same day: isn’t that a bit too much for a man?

Now this advertisement from 1982 shows you how he pulled off that trick: Continue reading

Japanese Rustoseums (part thirty four)

March 22, 2012 / banpei / 1 Comment

It is a terrible shame to leave such a nice Toyota Carina GT-R AA63 rusting away after a fence:

You can already see its factory boot spoiler is loosening it grip on the bootlid, so it is only a matter of time before it stats to grow some brownish rust around that spot.

On this second photo is even a worse discovery: Continue reading

WTF: anti-gravity Skyline C211

March 19, 2012 / banpei / 1 Comment

I was just watching some of the old Skyline C211 commercial videos and I must have seen these videos tens of times already. That’s when I noticed something odd between 0:10 and 0:16…

Can anyone already guess what it is? Continue reading

Down on the Street: Honda Civic S

March 18, 2012 / banpei / 1 Comment

I already spotted that the owner of the Honda Accord mk2 didn’t use it regularly anymore, but earlier this week I also noticed this little red 1982 Honda Civic Sport creeping between a couple of the black poles marking the pavement from the parkinglot:

Yes indeed: clever parking when all spots are taken. You can’t do that with modern cars anymore!
In the pictures here it was properly parked btw. ;)

Also after seeing the car up close it I vaguely remembered it: Continue reading

Brilliant: Soarer lace seat covers

March 16, 2012 / banpei / 0 Comments

One of the things that is typically Japanese are the lace seat (or headrest) covers that you mostly see in Japanese taxis or luxury cars. Apparently Toyota sold OEM lace covers with the Soarer griffin logo embroided on them:

This Soarer was photographed outside Gallery L who is renowned for restoring beautiful kyusha cars. The Soarer is the “lesser” 1G-GEU powered GZ10 model, so it doesn’t feature the smooth 5M or 6M engine however they did put some effort in it: it now features a five speed manual. That means you can really get the best out of that 140hp engine. :)

Here you can see embroided lace headrest covers up close: Continue reading