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Remembering Japanese cars from the past

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Hachi roku waltz!

Found this on HR Blog yesterday:
Waltzing hachi rokus in Ireland!!!

I think it is a very memorable achievement! I already think dancing an AE86 is wicked, but revving the Emperor Waltz by Johann Strauss is simply amazing!!

Hilarious: Den Harrow

Again I had a tough one after last weeks Mr. T raps and Jozin z Bazin, but again I managed to find another gem! 🙂

This week I found Den Harrow when searching material for the Italo Disco vs Early demoscene posting. I remember Den Harrow from my youth and back then I thought some of his songs were great!
One of my favorites was Future Brain (great clip!)

Well, boy was I wrong. I just heard “A Taste Of Love” on Last.fm and immediately thought it was great stuff for the hilarious section.


When looking at this and reading the Wikipedia page about Den Harrow I found this small quote:

Revealing the Truth
After years of continued fame and popularity, the fans of Den Harrow were faced with an unbelievable news, it was revealed both by the frontman of Den Harrow Stefano Zandri and the producers that they had been hiding the truth from their millions of fans. It was disclosed that Stefano Zandri did not actually sing his own songs; he was essentially a character who lip-synched to vocals produced by a number of other Italo singers.

No shit? He didn’t sing that himself? Amazing nobody ever noticed! It’s soooo obvious if you look at that live perfomance! And the alternating voices between the songs and years?

Something that would be a nice thing is that if Den Harrow jumped from the Italo disco bandwagon on to the Eurobeat bandwagon during the early 90s instead of persisting that he learned to sing and still performes 100% the same song over and over again

The sad thing is that he nowadays claims he leaned to sing and still sings Future Brain with the same voice as 23 years ago!

Car feature: Original AE86 cup racer from Holland Part 2

The AE86 driven by Mike van der Raadt was one of the cars used in the Dutch Corolla Cup. The Dutch Corolla Cup started out as a one brand only racing cup. All cars should be equal to each other and could only be modified under restrictions. This allowed drivers to show their skills more than the tuners could do with time and money. It made the cup very competitive and fun to watch. Of course, due to the equality of the cars, a lot of banging was done and not many of the cars survived.
Here you can see some pictures of the Dutch Corolla Cup in action:
Dutch Corolla Cup with three Corolla TE71 competing
Dutch Corolla Cup with four Corolla TE71 in the rain

When the Dutch Corolla Cup entered its second generation of Rollas it received a different engine as well: the 4AGE of the AE86 instead of the 2T-G of the TE71. With this new engine it became again the field of time and money. The more money put into the team, the better the outcome. Then in 1986, also probably due to the obsoletion of RWD Toyota cars, the new Starlet took over and the races were only driven with the new FWD Starlets.

Of course the teams and drivers still used their Corollas in different cups and races, like for instance the ETCC, BTTC or endurance races.

The AE86 driven by Mike van der Raadt was a very competitive car in the Dutch Corolla Cup and not only in the Corolla Cup, but also later on in the Super Touring Class (nowadays referred as Group A). Theo Koks said in his last interview that there were only two really big competitors: the AE86 driven by Mike van der Raadt and the VW Sirocco of the director of Zandvoort.
As you can see in the picture below the Corolla was competing in the Super Touring class:
Dutch Corolla AE86 tuned by Nobels

And it claims that the Corolla GT put the lap record of Zandvoort back into Dutch hands. IMO that is a bit impossible: Formula one just disappeared from Zandvoort back then and atleast those cars should be much much faster than this Corolla GT. Perhaps the lap record was set for the Super Touring class.

Back to the Corolla Cup: there are most probably still some other Corolla Cup or endurance racecars out there. I know for instance that the AE86 driven by Jasper Spaan stared its life as an endurance racer. It is RHD, non-European from origin and had a diff cooler in its axle. It was stored for 16 or 17 years when he bought it. Maybe this car was used in one of the endurance races on Spa as well.

I did find a bunch of pictures of Toyota Corollas (AE86) on Spa Francorchamps here, but no pictures of Jasper’s car. Anyone got more pictures of the old endurance races on Spa Francorchamps?

Tribute: Paul Newman Skyline RS R30

I read the news yesterday and Japanese Nostalgic Car blogged about this as well: Paul Newman passed away.

Apart from many good movies he made he was also quite close to Nissan: he raced several Datsuns during the 60s and 70s and in the early 80s he even got a special edition Nissan Skyline R30 with his name on it (rebadged GT-EX) and featured the ads for them:

Another small detail: the last Skyline R30 in the ads features the Plasma FJ engine which I blogged about in May this year:
http://www.banpei.net/content/nissan-silvia-bs110-rs240-rally
Therefore it should be a Skyline RS in the ad.

I think there was no greater tribute in his life than this. 😉

Carina Sightings: Toyota Carina AA63 vs Volkswagen Polo (Gol) in Peru

I found this recent video of a dragrace on 24th of august 2008 with a final between a Volkswagen Polo (called Gol here) and a Toyota Carina AA63 in Peru.


17 seconds Final Round August 24 2008 CADEPOR
Spoiler: unfortunately the Carina AA63 does not win this race (0.6 seconds) but I think it is very nice to see that the AA63 actually made it to other countries than Japan!

As you can see in the picture below it is a LHD car, so it is not imported from Japan:
Toyota Carina AA63 dragracer in Peru

The side of the car has the “Twincam 16” writings on it, it has 15 inch Celica Supra rims and the rear lights look kouki to me. In other words: this a genuine left hand drive AA63 outside Japan. 🙂

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