Several readers have posted this nugget of awesomeness in our forums now, and with good reason. The Celica you see in the pic above is the end result of the most thorough, intense restoration we’ve ever seen for J-tin. It started life as a Group B rally car that competed in the Hong Kong-Beijing Rally of 1985 - when nearly all of that nation’s billion or so people were still riding bikes - enduring 2500 miles of dings and dents on unpaved terrain. Then it was left to rust for about 20 years.

At that point, most people would have written it off, but not the artisans at Makela Auto Tuning of Finland. By the looks of it, every body panel, seam, floorboard and frame rail was recreated from fresh steel. Metal is like putty to these people. We tried to comprehend the amount of effort and man-hours the restoration must have taken, but only reminded ourselves of grade school when we first learned about the concept of infinity. There’s really no point in even trying to describe it, so just check out their gallery. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, that’s over 300,000 words right there.

The best part is that as of January 2008, these mad Finns have begun work on a second Hong Kong-Beijing Rally Celica. If possible, this car looks to be in even worse condition that the first one, apparently composed of one part metal and 3 parts rust. This time, they’ve cut the car down to the bare frame and are doing nothing short of rebuilding it from scratch. It’s like the Bionic Woman, but with cars.

Remember the M. Yokota Collection, the vintage car museum/chocalatier/squirrel zoo in Gumna Prefecture? Clearly, a mind as active and eccentric as that of Mr. Yokota’s cannot be easily calmed. The latest manifestation of his love for nostalgics is the M. Yokota Fall Rally, one of the many car shows and rallies that he organizes. Open to Showa Era cars only, the rally had over 200 entrants and started at the Skyland Amusement Park near Mt. Haruna, the geological formation that served as Shuichi Shigeno’s inspiration for Initial-D’s Mt. Akina. Click on over to Urban Racer to see a hachiroku dicing it up with 2000GTs and Ferraris and the rest of their coverage.

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

Our Aussie friends at grandJDM bring us news of a new movie about rallying coming out in Japan.  SS, an abbreviation for Special Stage, is based on a manga of the same title, and while Sho Aikawa is the leading name on the credits, we all know the real stars are the cars.

The protago-mobile will be an AWD Mitsubishi Starion, and according to the official website, supporting roles will include a GDB Subaru Impreza WRX STi, R32 Nissan Skyline GT-R, Techart Porsche Cayman, Ford Focus RS (that would be a hotted-up European Focus, not the Hertz fleet darling we get here), and the manga-biquitous Toyota AE86.

The trailer promises all manner of nighttime mountain racing and what appears to be the requisite underdog story. Check out the an English article here.  The film opens January 12, 2008.  We eagerly await the inevitable Tomica versions.

[grandJDM]

Despite millions of TRD stickers gracing the flanks of everything from pickups to Priuses, nothing street-legal has ever had the gall to jettison the “Toyota” part of its name and go only by TRD. Well leave it up to the Aussies. I mean, if they can infiltrate Hollywood by concealing any trace of stretched vowels in their speech, surely they can strap a supercharger to a hotted-up Camry and squeeze 323 horses out of it. Well, they’ve gone and done just that, and the resulting hoon magnet is the TRD Aurion.

The nostalgic connection in all of this is that TRD Australia’s new website has an entire section devoted to Toyota’s 50th anniversary in motorsports with cool archival photos and a wicked video that includes, among other things, a first-gen Celica rally car in a sweeping powerslide through the snow, fiery explosions, an airborne Toyopet Crown. Fittingly, Toyota’s first venture into auto racing was in Oz’s Mobilgas Rally.

[Source: TRD Australia]

Old pros Jayant Shah and HW “Lofty” Drews ran their Datsun 260Z in the Tanzanite One Arusha Rally recently, which served only as a warmup to the upcoming Kenya Airways East Africa Safari Classic Rally in November. You might remember Drews as one of the original pilots of the famous 240Z rally car who, along with Shekhar Mehta, won the original Safari Rally outright in 1973.

The Safari Classic is a vintage event held in the spirit of the event’s heyday when Datsuns, Mitsubishis and Lancias duked it out in the birthplace of humanity. To enter, your chariot of choice has to be 1974 or older. The dust clouds start billowing on November 25th in Mombasa, Kenya.

Source: [East Africa Safari Classic]

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.