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Motoharu Kurosawa driving the Nurburgring Nordschleife

January 25, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

Yesterdays posting about Motoharu Kurosawa made me wonder what videos I could find about Motoharu Kurosawa. I did find a lot of videos from which I like this video the most:

It is Gan-san doing an almost flat out round on the Nurburgring Nordschleife with a Honda S2000 prototype! Imagine that the whole S2000 wasn’t available back then and it must have attracted a lot of attention back then. If you look careful enough on the last seconds of the video a large part of the car was wrapped in covers so the press wouldn’t see its final shape!

As you can see the car is very fast! It passes a lot of motorcycles with great ease and he drives several times at the limit, sometime losing control just a tad bit. But during most of the run he remains seated very calm.

The run isn’t timed, but it is somewhere around the 8:45. If you look at the laptimes you will see that it around the same laptime as Horst von Saurma did with a S2000. But it is nowhere near Gan-san’s own record of 7:56 with the NSX-r.

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

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