As you get ready to line up outside of your electronics retailer at 4 AM on Black Friday, we offer the comfort and convenience of ordering from your own home, the best holiday gift you can get this holiday season, second only to De Beers diamonds and Lexuses wrapped up in giant bows, JNC stickers! We’re selling these babies at cost, too. Can’t beat that with a bat. Our shop section is here.

New article up. A couple of classics showed up at the ongoing LA Auto Show. [LINK]

Last week we did a short profile on the funky 60s Honda Vamos mid-engined convertible trucklet.    But like all other JDM manufacturers of the same era, Subaru also had a range of funky little small-capacity commercial vehicles as well.

Subaru’s version was called the Sambar.  The nameplate lives on today in the form of a Kei-class van but the 60s version was quite a cool little miniature version of the VW Kombi.

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Sorry about the lack of updates. Our computer suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure that we’ll be slowly recovering from. In the meantime, enjoy this video, in which Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson lines up almost every iteration of a Z-car ever made in one big drag race. The winner, not surprisingly, is a 1990 300ZX twin-turbo, which Clarkson calls an 80s car. Perhaps he was just phoning it in, since the rest of the show looks like the detritus that ended up Top Gear’s editing floor, but it’s entertaining nonetheless. The Z-cars are at 4:13. Thanks to Madflava for the tip!

UPDATE: The operatives at MI6 have taken down the videos to defend the honor of the Queen and the BBC. Luckily, tipster J found this link to the video on YouTube.

A couple of weeks ago, we touched on the topic of the Prince R380 racecar in our retrospective on the Hakosuka Skyline GT-R. As we take up the story, the S54B Skyline debuted at the Japan Grand Prix in 1964. That day, the Skylines won the Touring Car class easily, but was beaten to the flag by the Porsche 904, a purebred mid-engined tarmac racer. Dr Sakurai, head of engineering at Prince Motors, then took steps to ensure that Prince would have a purebred racing car of its own, to wrest back glory at this most prestigous of all Japanese motorsport events.

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Empire Z will be holding a meet on December 1st.

Empire Z will be holding its First Annual Car Show located at Corona Nissan on December 1st from 9am to 3pm. There will be cars, music, food, raffle prizes, goody bags, and vendors present.

Entry Fee is $25.00 which will include T-Shirt and food. Awards will be given out for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places for each category of Z (i.e. 240Z, 260Z, 280Z, 280ZX, 300ZX(Z31), 300ZX(Z32), 350Z). Datsun Roadsters are also welcomed and an award will be given out for them also.

Come join us for a fun day and great people. If you have any questions or comments please email them to empirezadmin@emiprez.com . Hope to see you there.

Location: Corona Nissan, 2575 Wardlow Rd, Corona, CA 92882

Map Location

So check it out if you’re in the area.

Well, at least in pop culture. And even then, only just barely.

Music mixing community The Mixing Bowl are, from what I can tell, in the process of putting together a compilation of mixes from artists on their forums. The album artwork features a Dome Zero on the cover, a car you may remember Kev discussing in some detail not too long ago here at grandJDM.

That’s about the extent of the car’s involvement with the album (unless someone’s decided to write a song about it. Now that’d be something), but I thought it complements the artwork pretty nicely and figured I’d share with y’all.

You’ll need to register if you want to see the forum thread, but there’s not really any great amount of talk about the car itself.  Points go to user “Nifty” though for knowing his shit.

Click through to see the full album cover.

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