The hottest car on Earth right now is none other than the Lexus LFA. Let’s see: performance among the world’s best, a roaring engine by Yamaha, and a sharply styled body that belies a state-of-the-art chassis. Oh, and it’s also the most expensive Japanese car ever built. No wonder mainstream car mags are calling it Japan’s first supercar.
However, JNC readers might disagree. Over forty years ago the same automaker hit all those points with the Toyota 2000GT. Jay Leno’s the only we know of that’s even mentioned this predecessor.
Like everyone else at SEMA, we drooled over the LFA at its US debut. As we stood there with mouths agape, the Lexus rep saw us holding a copy of JNC and exclaimed, “Hey, I love this mag!” We weren’t about to let an endorsement like that go to waste! We wrangled a 2000GT/LFA photo shoot on the spot and a week later we were in Toyota’s top secret unmarked warehouse somewhere in Torrance.
Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes cell phone cam pic. The full article will be in JNC #4 and as far as we know, it’ll be the only article showing these two stupendously magnificent machines together.
This slideshow is from the excellent KGC10kai blog, please check it out, it’s chock full of great photography (he must be a good guy, he has great taste in music!). I believe this was a club run last weekend, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many C10s on the road at once!
Kataoka Racing Service is a workshop in Hyogo, which is in the Kansai region of western Japan. For years, they’ve held regular trackdays for nostalgics (which they call Battle Royal), and the most recent one was last weekend. Here’s a terrific vid, which shows what an awesome variety of cars that KRS get at their events. There are Hakos and Zeds galore of course, but also Isuzu Bellett, multiple 510s, Starlets, RX3s and even a Sunny Truck mixing it up on the bumpy corners of Central Circuit!
Good grief, Charlie Brown! There are many things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, but Toyotaku may have just received the greatest gift of all. Japan’s Best Car magazine is reporting that an affordable, mid-engined sports car might be in the works! (more…)
Well, for obvious reasons Japan doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. So here’s a nice autumnal scene chock full of J-tin. And on this special day we’d like to quote the words of JNC reader Dachshund, who composed this beautiful piece of prose in response to seeing a Toyota Crown 2-Door Hardtop Royal Saloon in our JNC Sightings thread. We wish all JNC readers a safe and bountiful Thanksgiving!
I’m [thankful] that we can still today, say we live in a world where an ancient Japanese man can turtle around in the La-Z-Boy of an immaculately maintained, anti-socially-large-for-having-only-two-doors, decades old Crown pretending to be Elvis. He’s even managed to use his station to wrangle himself a wife young enough that her hair is rendered in color.
The Japanese have officially redefined, and refined, the meaning of “only in America”. We should be ashamed of this.
For some reason I get the impression that the windows of that thing are probably tinted to just the degree necessary, to make all youth culture and hentai around you disappear.
…They probably make the world around you appear ten percent poorer than it actually is, too. It’s the kind of car I’d love to drive through a seedy alleyway, just to lightly shoo away all the bums who would try to wipe rags across the windshield.
It’s impossible for me to pick a favorite nostalgic, but if I had a tanto against my finger I’d probably yell out “Toyota Crown!” at the last minute. Show me photos of the annual Mooneyes Crown Picnic and you might as well siphon the drool directly from my salivary glands. (more…)
Listen up, those of you with torsos. We hereby declare the start of the JCCS x JNC T-shirt contest! This year was the fifth anniversary of the gathering that kick-started the entire nostalgic car movement, and due to high demand all the shirts were sold out at the event.
However, the Japanese Classic Car Show crew has made a limited run of JCCS 2009 T-shirts available for purchase. Cars featured include the Toyota Celica, Datsun 620, Mazda R100 and Honda Civic. Regular price is $15 plus shipping, but they have also generously donated three shirts to JNC readers to be selected at random!
Please send an email to the feedback address at the bottom of the page with “JCCS T-SHIRT CONTEST” in the subject line. The contest will run until 11:59pm Pacific Time December 1, 2009. Gokouun o inorimasu!
Congrats to Micah J. for winning Import Bible x JNC T-shirt Contest! Your new threads depicting a flared S30 Zed on deep dish Wats will arrive shortly. If you didn’t win, don’t despair. You can still order them at ImportBible.com. There’s even a group buy! And we will be starting another T-shirt contest momentarily. Stay tuned.
A Nissan Skyline KGC10 2000-GTX appeared on Jalopnik’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe the other day, and for the asking price of $20,000 it got a barrage of the pipe. The long-running series asks readers to vote whether a particular vehicle is worth the asking price based on an ebay auction or craigslist ad. Unfortunately, that presupposes that its readers actually know anything about hakosuka Skylines. (more…)
