This baby blue beaut of a Toyota Corona Mark II is the mintiest we’ve ever spotted. The odometer reads 16,041 miles and the condition seems to corroborate that story. The door jambs could be licked. The trunk mat is as flat as Kansas. According to the seller, everything works, every square millimeter of paint is original, and it has never seen snow or salt.

The Corona Mark II was a more luxurious, slightly stretched version of the more common RT40 barikan Corona. It’s still powered by a four-cylinder 18R-C, but it eventually became its own model a few generations later, when the “Corona” was dropped and it simply became the “Mark II.” It’s the Cressida’s great-granddaddy.

Interestingly, the auction description says it’s part of a Youngstown, Ohio collection being trimmed, which begs the question: what’s in the rest of the collection?

More delicious photos after the jump. (more…)

Here’s a car that’s definitely no clunker. In the 60s Toyota put out a series of commercials in which their cars performed zany stunts to demonstrate their resilience. Take this RT20 Corona, for example. Sold as the Tiara in the US with a 1900cc engine, it jumps, smashes through walls of drums and even gets rolled off a cliff long before Top Gear tried to kill a Toyota. These videos are not embeddable, so click on the images to go to the actual commercial.

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It’s not Friday yet but in honor of known motorfan Akio Toyoda’s ascension to the top spot at Toyota, here’s a two-part video about the company’s motorsports history. Based on the intro with WRC ST185 and Ironman Stewart pickups, it looks like this video was made in the early 90s. But soon it delves into a brief history of the automobile itself, starting with the Benz trike and the 1907 Takuri.

From there goes on to talk about motorsports with early footage from Indianapolis, Daytona Beach and a 1936 Japanese auto race that even gives a shout out to then-18-year-old Soichiro Honda and his first race car.

From there, we get to see the Toyota AA racing a steam engine, a 1956 Toyopet Crown on a London-to-Tokyo 50,000km drive, and some fantastic footage of a 1957 Crown on the Mobilgas Rally around the Australian continent.

Part 2 after the jump. (more…)

Remember the Jack Safro collection we told you about last month? One of the cars at the Mecum auction was an original 8,769-mile 1966 Toyota Corona so new the plastic wrap was still on the door panels. Back in 2007 when JNC was only a month old this exact car sold for just $16,740, a record price for its time. But when the gavel dropped this time the highest bid was a whopping $36,000. With the economy the way it is, a better deal than AIG stock! The value of nostalgics is really going up. (more…)

May 17, 2009, Mission Bay, San Diego, CA

Southern California hardly ever disappoints for the sheer number of nostalgics it contains. Case in point is the Old Skewl Meet today in gorgeous (overcast) Mission Bay in San Diego. This was just a get together, a free event, but it attracted not only locals, but a few guys from Los Angeles and even the Bay Area!

510’s and Ae86’s always show up to these events, but there were a few other surprises as well. (more…)

If you happened to see a blue Cressida wagon and blue AE86 pulled over on the 710 by the California Highway Patrol on the way to Toyotafest last Saturday, that was yours truly at JNC. We were running late and, shall we say, briskly, but an irate Officer Poncharello thought we were street racing. Somehow, we were able to convince him we weren’t and made it to the show to take the photos in this gallery. Unfortunately, each of us still got one of these: (more…)

Who says there are no nostalgics left on the east coast? In recent weeks both the Washington and New York Times have published stories about owners of J-tin on opposite ends of the mileage spectrum. First up is Linda Smith, owner of a 1972 Toyota Corona that she purchased with only 1900 miles on the clock. The trip home to DC from Florida almost doubled the odometer reading. Her husband offered this unfortunate truism about old Japanese cars: “Their sheer reliability meant most of them racked up hundreds of thousands of miles before finally going to the scrap yeards [sic].”

A couple hundred miles north in the Big Apple is Morton Ash’s  one-owner 1975 Datsun 280Z. At over 330,000 miles on the clock, it has 100 times the mileage of Smith’s Corona but Ash still drives it at least once a week in the city known for some of the nation’s worst roads.

Both articles are worth a read for their insight into the owners as much as the cars themselves. Also, it’s nice to see newspapers paying attention to old school Japanese cars and bringing such stories to a mainstream audience.

This backyard stash of J-tin was just sitting about on a quiet suburban side street. The owner of this trove may not want to be revealed so I won’t mention any names, but he did say that the majority of these cars will, one day, be restored. A few are too far gone, like the black S30 Crown and the blue Sports 800, but the rest should keep him busy for a while. Amazingly, he said that the neighbors don’t complain at all. Instead, they think it’s cool to see the old cars. Nobody tell them about HOAs.

More pics after the jump. (more…)

Random Japan sighting: Isn’t it nice to know the Corona wagons employed by Denso are still in service? I thought these were KE70 Corollas originally but apparently they are Coronas!

Closeup after the jump (more…)

If Tuesday’s Subaru-on-Subaru action left you wanting more nostalgic car chase excitement, you’re in luck. Most Japanese films had a manufacturer sponsor that supplied them with cars, so all the main cars – and sometimes even the chase fodder – were usually of the same brand. But 1979’s No Grave for Us featured a multi-marque mix of J-tin doing what they do best!

In this scene our baddie absconds with a bag full of ill-gotten yen in a RT80 Toyota Corona, only to have our hero (played by total badass Yusaku Matsuda) hunt him down in a beautiful Mazda Savanna RX-3. Throw in a Nissan President for good measure and you have one awesome pursuit.

What’s more, the footage seems much more raw. When you can see suspensions bouncing up and down like paddleballs you know these cars are being driven hard.