The news keeps trickling in from West Sussex. The Goodwood Festival of Speed is going on right now, as we are simulataneously typing this and kicking ourselves for not scraping together the cashish we needed to go.

Autoblog has just posted a gallery of Thursday evening’s opening night ball and unveiling of the giant torii gate tribute to Toyota, this years’s honored marque. Apparently, underneath the five Toyota race cars suspended in mid-air, sat six more significant sleds from the Big T’s past, including the 800hp 1970 Toyota 7 turbo (pictured) and a replica of the 1957 Toyota Crown that ran the Australian Mobilgas Rally and ushered in 50 years of Toyotas in motorsport.

The centerpiece of the Festival is a 1.16 mile timed competition hillclimb on the grounds of the Earl’s estate. Thus far, Anthony Reid has driven two Nissans, a 350Z GT500 and a BTCC (British Touring Car Championship) Primera to their respective class wins.

Saturday kicked off with the Cartier Style et Luxe concours, where five of the world’s six Bugatti Type 41 Royales were gathered, totalling $60 million. At the “Green Goodwood” exhibit Nissan showed off its eco-friendly Pivo Concept, a car that could have doubled as a capsule from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Next, F1 cars took to the stage, with the Toyota TF106 and Honda’s Earth-schemed RA107 driven by Ralf Schumacher and Jenson Button, but the highlight, and a sight worth the $80+ admission fees alone, must have been Mark Webber and Kazuki Nakajima drifting their F1 cars past the Goodwood House. Later in the afternoon, Rod Millen took his Pike’s Peak-winning 800hp AWD Toyota Tacoma (pictured) out for a spin.

Did we mention we were kicking ourselves yet?

Images courtesy of Autoblog and Goodwood.co.uk.

Even though we’ve only been going for a week so (and going strong!), grandJDM has proven to be an absolute blast for all of us.  We’ve been pushing for daily updates, and frankly it hasn’t been a challenge. There’s just so much excellent material out there!  We’ve lined up four or five beautiful cars to feature over the coming weeks, including interviews with their owners.  And even their owners have been suggesting other cars and fellow owners for us to interview!  So there’s no questioning the fact that grandJDM has some sweet times ahead.

With that in mind, we’d like to say a quick “cheers!” to a couple of our fellow websites/blogs.  Japanese Nostalgic Car, and Auto Otaku - both highly respected sites in our minds, and very much a major source of inspiration for the creation of this site right here - have both blogged about grandJDM in the past week.  This has resulted in a welcome boost in grandJDM’s traffic and exposure in the classic JDM community, and for that, we’re mighty thankful!So cheers guys, keep up the good work with your own sites, and our already healthy and growing community will only get stronger.

Japanese Nostalgic Car
Auto Otaku

We thought it might be a neat idea to provide weekly links to some Japanese blogs. After all, blogging is not a phenomenon to be found strictly in the west! And with so many excellent English language blogs devoted to Japanese cars, it only makes sense that there’d be just as many excellent Japanese language blogs about classic JDM!

However, we don’t speak Japanese (oh the agony!), so you’ll have to bear with us while we use Google’s translator tool to figure out what’s going on with each of these blogs.

This week’s blog belongs to Private Tune / Murata Team, and frankly we can’t quite figure out the specific aim of the blog. What we can tell you though, is that there’s a fantastic selection of photos in many of the posts, so head on over and a bit of a browse through the pages of Private Tune’s blog!

Original link | Translated version

Perhaps Ming the Merciless would have been more successful in his fight against Flash Gordon if, instead of being an evil Asian caricature, he was actually Tim Mings and had a fleet of Honda N600 and Z600s at his disposal.

We’ve always wanted to visit Mings, owner of Merciless Mings: The World’s Largest Honda 600 Shop, but have never had the honor. Thanks to Jalopnik, which has been on a microcar mission in SoCal these days, we now know what we’ve been missing.

The efficient, front-wheel-drive cars may seem more conventional than other early Hondas like the S- or T-series, but Honda still imbued them with their fair share of borrowed motorcycle technology. The Ns started out as 360cc kei cars but only the 600s were imported to the US starting in 1969, the first Hondas officially imported here. Cars like the S roadsters or Brian Baker’s 1964 T500F pickup were brought over privately or ended up here by chance. The sportier (a relative term) Z came about in 1970, after the N’s run ended but used the same 36hp motor, but in true Honda genealogy the N-series was succeeded by the Life, which later spawned its own offspring like the Life Step Van.

It would have been easy to underestimate Hondas based on the diminutive stature of these early imports, but then again, no one thought a Speedo-sporting 1930’s superhero would look funny in retrospect either.

Click here to read about Jalopnik’s visit to planet Mongo.

Perhaps the ultimate - and undoubtedly the first - JDM Supercar, the Toyota 2000GT has in the past few years become more well known and appreciated outside of Japan, sending its value through the roof. Not that it was ever cheap. When it was released in the late 60s it was priced at about 30% more than a Jaguar E-Type, or almost double a Corvette. It’s price was largely the reason only 337 were ever built from 1967-1970.

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Each year, the Goodwood Festival of Speed pays tribute to the featured marque by suspending an assortment of its million-dollar race cars several stories above ground on a huge piece of outdoor art. With Toyota taking the honors this year, we’ve been graced with something that resembles either a suspension bridge or the world’s most expensive Newton’s Cradle. From this puny pic, we can only tell that a.) the mixed media consist of an F1 car, some other open-wheel racer (Indy?), a TS020 GT-One, a Group C prototype, and a Celica rally car; and b.) it looks like rain.

We seriously considered jumping on a redeye to attend this event, but logic prevailed. Scientists of the world, get cracking on the transporter!

Image courtesy of Goodwood.co.uk.

Probably one of the more distinctively recognised and admirably styled models among the Trueno/Corolla range, the TE27 Trueno Levin GT was built from the E20 series - the second generation of the Trueno. Read on for a little more info, and some photos!

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