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…)

Doesn’t it seem like 1998 was not that long ago, when in fact it’s been over 10 years already? Back before the formation of D1GP, drag racing was still all the rage in Japan. Drifting was on juuust the verge of bursting out from its underground roots but until then, the tuning giants were throwing down at the drag strip. (more…)

Should the urge to extend the hood line of your car into some kind of Death Race-style slicer suddenly overwhelm you, here’s a how-to using a Nissan C210 Skyline that’s been floating around for a while. Yes, now this bosozoku style accessory can be yours too for the low low price of welding several square feet of sheetmetal to the front of your car! Look, here’s another using a Toyota Mark II. A new direction for the JNC wagon, perhaps?

Thanks to datsunfreak and white_raven!

This is probably not going to be of any interest to most of you, but we’re jumping out of our seats right now because we just got an email from Toyotageek informing us that the JNC wagon is now available in 1/43 scale!

Here it is, the DISM Toyota mark II Wagon, available in white, silver, and – wait for it – dark blue! DISM is a line of 70s and 80s diecast cars from Aoshima, the toy company known by many JNCers for their plastic scale model kits. At approximately $40 per car we can’t afford to collect these but we just might have to make an exception. Some more pics from different angles and such 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…)

They say that the goose-step, ridiculous and inefficient as it may seem, became the march of choice for dictatorships around the world specifically because of its silly appearance. After all, only a terrifying madman could force thousands of able-bodied soldiers to walk that absurdly in precise formation. It’s a method of instilling both awe and fear simultaneously.

That pretty much sums up the feeling we get when we see this horde of bosozoku cars. Cantilevered lip spoilers, double-wide fender flares and yard-long exhaust pipes look insane when parked, no doubt. But get caught in a swarm of them wreaking havoc on the expressway and suddenly it all begins to make sense, even when a dude dressed head-to-toe in a tiger costume rides a convertible’s door sill as his mohawked associate maniacally twirls a baseball bat in the air. It makes one wonder, are they’re launching a siege on Bartertown or something? It’s probably best not to ask questions and just get the hell out of their way.

One more completely deranged pic after the jump. (more…)