Remembering Japanese cars from the past
This really is an Ebay treasure: a genuine Dutch registered Prince Skyline S50! Yet again I received this via Japanse Klassieker group on Facebook, Roland Verheijen posted it on their page:
I knew they have been sold in (small numbers) in the Netherlands but never had any hope one would turn up for sale once. Well, today one did turn up for sale and it really is a treasure!
Don’t have high hopes for this one as the body is very rusty: Continue reading
Everybody knows it is impossible to walk on water unless it is frozen, but someone forgot to tell that to this Prince Skyline S50 owner:
In this commercial for the second generation Prince Skyline they show it has this very advanced feature: Continue reading
Today is my birthday and I was wondering what JDM car would share my birthday and started to search for it. Apparently it was quite hard to find as most release dates are only recorded on the month granularity.
So in the end I came up with the Prince Skyline ALSI-1 sharing partly my birthday:
I’m not that old to be 55 yet and it may be uncertain it actually shared my birthday on the exact date, but at least if you shuffle the year of release a bit you will find my birth-year. ;)
Happy 55th birthday ALSI-1!
I found an early 70s short documentary about the development of the Nissan Skyline C110! It starts with the the C110 development, then moves to manufacturing of a C110 and then comparing a C110 to previous generations around 2:00 with a four-split screen.
The only touges we saw in the past were nicely paved mountain passes with screaming twin cams drifting in a downhill battle. Nice to see there were actually rough touges in the 70s!
The end of the first and second video continue on the design and crash testing of the Skyline C110:
The test track is, of course, the Oppama Grandrive. Funny to see they already covered the looks of the testcars/prototypes with black cloth as well back then! And just when you think everything is going well they show the C110 Skyline crash test! What’s even more heartbreaking are all those crashed C110s piled up with foliage growing through them.
I must say this is one of the nicest vintage videos I’ve seen in ages!
One of the people I’m following on Youtube, uncrowdedmonarch, posted this video of a typically 60s race at Suzuka Circuit and I think it’s the 1964 Japanese Grand Prix:
The second race is Touring Class V where the Prince Skylines easily won from their competion (Hino Contessa 900, Nissan Bluebird 410) and took al first six places!
Looking at the results of the first race (skip to 6:42) this must have been the legendary second Japanese Grand Prix (held on 2nd and 3rd of May 1964) in which the new Prince Skyline S54 2000GTs lost to a single (privately entered) Porsche 904 in the GT-II class! Even though the Skylines took consecutively 2nd to 6th place blowing away the competition (MG-Bs and Isuzu Bellet) this loss was so humiliating that Dr. Sakuri of Prince Motors initiated a project to create the ultimate racecar to defeat the Porsche the next time. This grudge still lives on in the battle between Nissan and Porsche for the fastest lap times around the Nürburgring. This learned Nissan what the best place is to humiliate someone: its home turf! ;)
The project resulted in the amazing legendary Prince R380. The next time Prince and Porsche met (1966 Japanese Grand Prix) the R380 proved to be worthy to its maker: Prince defeated the Porsche 906 by taking first and second place!
One of the people I’m subscribed to on Youtube posted old footage of the first Japanese Grand Prix in 1963 in two videos. Unfortunately he/she does not permit embedding, so I can only post links here.
The first video shows the introduction of the Grand Prix. Then it features a GT race in which a Nissan Fairlady SPL213s wins of a few other cars like Triumph TR3 and TR4, but I also spotted a Austin Healey and a Porsche. This is followed by a touring car race which is very spectacular! A lot of entertaining sideways action with old Japanese tin like the Prince Skyline ALSI-2 and Skyline S50, Toyota Crown S40s and Nissan Cedrics. In my opinion this is the most enjoyable part of the two videos!
Japanese Grand Prix 1963 video #1
It gets followed by the second GT race which is a bit less spectacular than the first but it still contains some really good action.
Then the introduction of the Grand Prix itself which gets started in the second video. Personally I didn’t really like the Grand Prix itself that much after seeing all that action beforehand, but I can imagine the Japanse viewers back then thought the exact opposite!
Japanese Grand Prix 1963 video #2
You can watch the videos here:
Japanese Grand Prix 1963 part 1
Japanese Grand Prix 1963 part 2
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