Remembering Japanese cars from the past

Category: toyota ae86

Alternative Automotive Site of the Year Award

It is the end of the year and I see lots of sites being nominated for a Website of the year award. Personally I don’t really care about these kind of things since most sites that are nominated are too far off my own personal taste. Take for instance the Dutch nominees for “Automotive website of the year”:
Oldtimer Nederland – Basically a static page where you can find parts and repairmen, but anything Asian or Japanese is not included
Onderdelen zoeker – Find second hand automotive parts. Anything older than 20 years can not be found
Autoscout 24 – Find and buy second hand cars
Autotrack – Find and buy second hand cars (didn’t we cover that already?)
Autotrader – Find and buy second hand cars (another one?)
Marktplaats Auto – Find and buy second hand cars (yet another one?)
Gebruikte Auto – Find and buy second hand cars (come on guys!)
Autoweek – Website of the largest Dutch automotive magazine
etc. etc.

As you can see, not really my cup of tea between those nominees and, as I see it, not really exciting sites and definitely most of them are old fashioned sites that are not following trends. The same goes for the nominees in the UK (with the exception of Pistonheads being nominated) and in several other countries. Don’t these guys have any clue what is going on in the world??

So I thought: why not nominate a bunch of automotive sites by the community and have an alternative automotive site of the year award (ASS-YA in short 😛 ) handed out to any site that has been nominated and voted as best.

Nomination is quite simple and consists of three basic rules:
1. The site/blog/community needs to be automotive related
2. You can’t nominate your own site/blog/community
3. When you nominate a site/blog/community you have to state the reason why you think it should be nominated.

You can send in a nomination by sending me a short email complying to the rules above before the 15th of November. You can send it to: banpei [at] banpei.net with the subject nominee Alternative Awards and I’ll take care of it. 😉

And because a blog post is nothing without pictures or video, here is a completely unrelated video:

Onboard video of a 4A-GZE powered hachi! :9

If you got distracted by this video: don’t forget to send in your nomination!!!

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!!

Quick search on AE86 at Amazon.com

Amazing! I’ve never really followed Amazon since I only bought books at local stores… Since I moved to Hilversum I don’t really have a good English bookstore anymore and I’m forced to buy my English books somewhere else.

That’s when I started to use Amazon again. For the fun I wanted to know what books there were on Toyota Corolla AE86. Boy what a surprise I had! 😉

First of all: top product was Car Hacks & Mods For Dummies, which of course is utterly crap!

Then I saw that not only books were sold, but also diecast models: AE86 diecast scale model

But then I scrolled down and saw these automitve products:
FRP Toyota Corolla AE86 bodykit and Prothane (18-2010) AE86 Bushings – AE86

The bushings are even cheaper than what we sold in the AEU86 shop or PASS Racing!

Of course I did search upon “AA63”, “TA63” and “Toyota Carina” but that did not return any relevant results… I think I only search on Amazon for interchangeable parts with the AE86 then. 😉

To give an impression what Toyota Corolla AE86 stuff is available on Amazon:

AE86 with 380hp back in 1991

I found this old footage on Youtube:

According to the user who placed the video this Corolla Levin AE86 has a 380hp turbo-ed 4AGE. Very impressive, and more impressive they did that 17 years ago!!

You can see the exhaust got a simple turbo manifold and a lot of piping go through the enginebay. The turbo is enormous, so I expect the boost being at least 16psi! Looking at the piping the car probably has an intercooler under the front air dam. And the engine is not a 4AGZE block which currently is a popular basis for turbocharging but a normal bigport (probably second generation) 4AGE: it still has the TVIS.

At first I doubted about the authenticy of this video, but if I look well to both surroundings (and clothing of the people) and other videos this user posted I can conclude that the footage is authentic! Back in those days the only modifications were functional modifications: tower brace, boost gauge, revmeter and that’s it. Other from that the car looks like a stock kouki AE86 which just rolled out of the Toyota factory!

HachiRock!! Festa 2008

I just found this on the HR Blog: HachiRock!! Festa 2008
HachiRock!! Festa 2008

This is one of the biggest Hachi Roku events in Japan, maybe even bigger than HachiRoku day!

It is amazing how many Hachi’s actually turned up there:
many many ae86s at HachiRock!! Festa 2008

They claim last year over 250 hachis turned up, but this year they limited it to 250 participants who already sold out the place in May!!

They had a little nice surprise for all attendants:
HachiRock!! Festa 2008 chocolates!
HachiRock!! Festa 2008 chocolates! Yummie! 🙂

You can read (ahum, look at pictures) more here:
http://www.geocities.jp/tz_factory86/080914hachirock.html

I could only dream the AEU86 4th annual meeting would exceed only 50 cars! Maybe if we would make it more exclusive it would attract more hachis. 😉

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