Remembering Japanese cars from the past

Tag: group 5 racing (Page 1 of 2)

I don’t know where to begin with this Fortran Drag Wheels advertisement – WTF?!

This Fortran Drag Wheels advertisement has so many WTF?!s in it that I simply don’t know where to begin. I did feature the Fortran Revolt wheels before and those wheels also had some interesting advertisements. But these Drag wheels, oh boy! Let’s just unravel this ad. Layer by layer, detail by detail.

Fortran Drag Wheels advertisement - I don't even know where to begin...
Fortran Drag Wheels advertisement – I don’t even know where to begin…

Gigantic woman towering the Manhattan Skyline

I think we can first start with the 1980s airbrush painting of a giantic woman which I can best describe standing in a Kiba-dachi stance towering over the Manhattan skyline. Her right high-heeled shoe is standing on top of the water in the Upper Bay or the Hudson River.

Chained up woman over the Manhattan skyline
Chained up woman over the Manhattan skyline

Is she wearing 1970s plateau shoes? She’s holding chains that seem to be coming from somewhere in downtown New York. The chains seem to break somewhere in the middle, but her arms don’t seem to suggest she is the one breaking it with force. On the contrary: she’s just holding them. Maybe the chain is put on a high voltage and now the centre link is disintegrating?

Over the moon and Jupiter

Giant moon and Jupiter. That gravitational pull must be immense!
Giant moon and Jupiter. That gravitational pull must be immense!

Behind the woman on the left, there is a gigantic moon. If the moon were this close to the earth, probably New York would have been flooded by the immense force of Moon-gravity. On the right of the woman, we can see a planet. Presumably, this is Jupiter. What is it doing there?

Another Skyline

Nissan Skyline GT-EX KGC211 floating in the Hudson River
Nissan Skyline GT-EX KGC211 floating in the Hudson River

The Manhattan skyline isn’t the only skyline in this advertisement. At the bottom of the advertisement, we can see a facelifted Nissan Skyline GT-EX C211 with a big golden 2000 GT Turbo sticker on the side of the car. Oy has some huge bubble-shaped over fenders and looks just like it was inspired by its Group 5 contemporaries. Why it’s floating on top of the water we don’t know. What we do know is that the wheels featured on this car are Fortran Drag Wheels. Even the license plate tells us so.

Drag, the Dynamic wheel - Fortan really knew how to create a good tag line!
Drag, the Dynamic wheel – Fortran really knew how to create a good tagline!

Above the woman, we can also see DRAG in bold painted letters and the tagline the Dynamic wheel. Why dynamic is written with a capital D is a mystery to me.

Conclusion

So, what do I make of this?
If you look at all these pieces separately, it doesn’t make sense at all. The chain, the moon, Jupiter, the floating Skyline GT-EX, and the woman over the Manhattan skyline. Nothing makes sense.

That is until I realized the randomness of all these things must have a meaning. The Fortran Drag wheels are called the Dynamic wheel for a reason. They need to be dynamic in any situation: a too-close-for-comfort moon with a huge gravitational pull. Rescuing a Godzilla-sized woman who is being chained down. Floating with big balloon-sized tires on your Fortran Drag wheels. Yes, it all makes sense now!

The other Nissan Silvia Super Silhouette racer

There is so much footage of the Hoshino Impul Nissan Silvia KS110 Super Silhouette race car that we tend to forget there was actually another car on the gird that resembled it: the Nissan Gazelle KS110 driven by Haruhito Yanagida!
Nissan Silvia KS110 Super Silhouette
In the season 1981 Yanagida’s car resembled Hoshino’s car with its bodyshape, but Yanagida’s car wasn’t a Silvia: it was a Gazelle. So you see the difference? 😉
I guess most of the audience also had difficulties and therefore Yanagida changed the bodyshape to the Nissan Bluebird 910 from the 1982 season onwards.

Photo found at: Minkara

Hilarious: Prius Super Silhouette racer!

At the Tokyo Auto Salon this year the Nihon Automobile College (NATS) made a couple of cars based upon another car. This Prius has been modified into a Celica Super Silhouette racer:
Prius Super Silhouette
Just imagine this Prius Super Silhouette going down the Fuji International Speedway in the Group 5 competition with a whopping 180 km/h with flames spitting out of th exhaust pipes right under the front doors! 😀

The front mimics a Celica Super Silhouette racer and at the rear it shows some more Toyota Celica RA25 inspiration with the banana tail lights: Continue reading

Video: 1984 Suzuka 1000km


Rocketpencil posted some new racing videos on Youtube including this 1984 Suzuka 1000km endurance race! These endurance races were always the main event for the so called Granchan races (Grand Championship) where a lot of mixed groups were racing at the same event. The Super Silhouette (Group 5) races were mostly a (short) prequel to the main event.

In this video you can see some of the Super Silhouette cars at 0:46, the Nissan Silvia Turbo and a Mazda RX7.

During the main event you can also see a few cars from a different group riding along: some Nissan Sunny B210s, Toyota Corolla Levin AE86s, Honda Civics, Mazda RX7s, a Toyota Starlet KP61, a Honda Ballade CRX and a Honda Prelude SN!

Repost: 30 years of Tamiya R/C cars

Now this is probably the coolest Tamiya poster I’ve ever seen:
30 years of Tamiya R/C cars
30 years of Tamiya R/C cars

This poster from 2006 covers the most important models by Tamiya in their 30 years of radio controlled cars. It starts with the Porsche 934 Turbo RSR Now on the top left and you can see many nice JDM models in there: next to the 934 a Group 5 Celica Celica liftback A28, in the mid left a Group 5 Nissan Fairlady S30 240Z, a Honda City Turbo, some Skyline R32s in the mid right and a Supra JZA80 at the right bottom. Can you spot some more great models I missed?

Found at Jalopnik via Burst sausages via Save the Enzos via ac75d’s photostream @ Flickr (can it even get reposted more than this? 😮 )

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