A Swiss Visits Japan!

Hi everybody, Tobias here! I’m HR’s first international blogger and this will be my first blog entry here! As a first post I would like to share some impressions from my 2008 trip to Japan, of course focused on our beloved Hachiroku!

We arrived on a very humid Thursday in late August in Narita, Tokyo. We jumped on the limousine bus to the city and already had plans for the upcoming weekend!

Ebisu D1GP

This was a very impressive sight arriving at this sacred ground of Japanese motorsport and of course drifting! Unfortunately, due to pouring rain during the morning, the track (and ourselves) were soaking wet!

These are the first pics from the pits in the downpour.

The Tec-Arts D1 machine.

It’s certainly one mean looking Trueno!

Here we have Up Garage’s  AE86 Trueno….

….With a mean engine spec. I really miss the NA ones though, but I guess D1 is just too hardcore nowadays for that.

The action! Hibino battling it out with Ueo Round 1 in the top 16
Fortunately it dryed up after lunch.

Round 2 of this battle.
Hibino got the up in both rounds but unfortunately his gearbox went bang just a few seconds after this photo.

Here is also some video from D1 (these cars are crazy loud!!)

Tsukuba Circuit

After the D1 event we did a lot of travelling and only came back to the car action about 8 days later.  We met up with some partners of mine and drove to Tsukuba Circuit. Unfortunately we found the main course occupied by a motorcycle race and on a small side track there was no AE86 racing happening. In one of the many the circuit areas around the track  I saw this poor little Trueno.

It had probably been sitting there for quite some time. I was already thinking about getting at the owner about it.

Fuji Speedway

Next day one of my partner picked us up in Tokyo with his crazy  RX-7 and we went up to Fuji Speedway. His FD is one crazy machine: 500hp, sequential box, really just all out mental! But Fuji was even more impressive. I have never seen such a nicely presented track and facilities. Everything was so new and clean. ( And I have seen a few now; Hockenheim, Nordschleife, Sepang and some smaller circuits too). The main course is really crazy with the long straight, cars are really getting up to speed there, but even more fun was the smaller drifting practice track.

Just a regular day at Fuji I guess….

Another nice lineup.

Some were quite beat up but still got the job done quite easily!

USS Auctions

Second last day I met up with another friend of mine and we went to the USS auctions in Tokyo. This is one crazy place, I have never seen so many cars in one place which were all for sale. I also found this one (I wonder if it was used as a delivery machine too!

You can get all kind of cars from this auction I really could not believe it. Here is me and my choice (hahaha!)

The last night we spent in Tokyo was getting really late. My partner with the FD wanted to show me what he did back in the day so he took us out for a ride. He used to race the Wangan highway with his FD until he got a huge fine from the authorities. Now we were out there with a regular van but he was still cutting corners like hell. You could really tell he knows his way around. Daikoku Futo was empty unfortunately. They told me crazy stories about this place, it must have been one crazy venue back in the days.

On another small rest area we discovered this tough 2 Door Levin:

A nice way to wrap up 2 crazy weeks in the land of the Hachiroku!