Remembering Japanese cars from the past
Last week I already featured another Toyota Chaser JZX100 Tourer V and guess what: within the same week I find another one parked down on the street! Well, actually not on the street but rather inside the parking garage of the nearest Ikea store. Nevertheless, when I drove down the circular ramp I immediately spotted the JZX100 and exclaimed another WTF?!
A Celica XX, also better known as the Celica Supra in the USA, is the first attempt by Toyota to create a Gran Tourer out of the Celica. The Celica XX 2000G isn’t particularly a car with a lot of room in the back. So how could this be a Family Album Treaure?
I found this photo on Flickr and the caption was “Akita Japan – 1979”. What caught my interest in this photo was the size of the family. I wondered how five adults can fit in a second generation Celica? Well they simply don’t!
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This is a more personal posting than anything informational on cars and other things that interest me. Like the title says, I picked up blogging again. As you may recall the blog posts became less and less frequent and that was because of a reason.
When I created my first proper (edited) videos back in 2015, I never intended them to take over the blogging. I reckoned it would be additional information to the blog because I would be able to add more information in the videos. If I would have to explain each and every variant of the 4A-GE and what their differences were, I would end up with a 30 minute read and it would look more like Wikipedia than a blog article. A video would give me the little edge to make it visually and transfer knowledge quicker, like this video on the Carina A60:
My earlier videos were all kind of experimental to see what would work and what not. As time progressed, my videos started to become more professional over time. I could say I’m a perfectionist and I really hate it to see some error I made in a video. This meant that creating informative videos would take more and more time from me. I would say my video about the Toyota AE86 Sports Package probably took me about a month to produce. Naturally this wasn’t full time as I was doing these videos in my spare time. However, total number of hours spent on that video would easily be 40-ish hours. That’s a full work week for me!
Like I said earlier, I’m creating these videos in my spare time. When I started doing them, I was working as a freelancer and had plenty of time to spare. When I returned to my ordinary desk-job again, I had to travel back and forth between home and the office for about 1 hour one way by train. This meant I had about 2 hours of time per day to dedicate to create videos and other projects. I could write the script during commute on Monday, record the voice over in the evenings and then edit the video the remainder of the week and post it up on Friday or Saturday. Then Covid-lockdowns happened.
As soon as the first lockdown happened, I was stuck at home with my kids and no “spare” time left. This meant I couldn’t post videos for a while and have my channel lose its momentum. I was able to churn out maybe one video per two or three months. How hard I tried, every consecutive video I posted got next to no views.
I did create my videos to share information with others, help others and hopefully make people smarter. Having next to no views at all isn’t very motivating to continue to make more. Naturally I started to create less and less videos. I made a total of 172 videos so far, but I have taken down many of them in the past months because they were either silly, too personal or I thought were of too low quality to remain online.
At the same time, as a side project, I decided I should better invest my time in writing a book and share my knowledge on the AE86. I started writing about two years ago and this coincided with the biggest churn in posted videos. I think I’m at 80% done with the book, so don’t start searching on Amazon yet!
So you may wonder why did I started blogging again? That’s a good question! The main reason is knowledge sharing. Stupid, weird or bizarre stuff I run into on a daily basis. Preserving information that otherwise might get lost. All these things could be turned into a video, but investing 10 hours on a 2 minute video that nobody will watch is a waste of time. It takes me perhaps 30 minutes to write down my thoughts. Another 10 to 15 minutes to re-read, re-write or re-phrase. So therefore I blog. I write down. I hope you all appreciate it.
My Toyota Carina TA60 isn’t unique by itself. But over the years I have tweaked it a bit to my own liking by adding fog lights at the front, 15 inch Celica Supra rims all around and a few more bits and pieces as well. I was browsing earlier today through some photos taken by Eelco at the Japan Classic Sunday 2023 earlier this year. All of a sudden I spotted my very own Carina TA60, but then in blue instead of white!
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Stepho’s Toyota Site has been an indispensable resource for the classic Toyota community over the past two decades. Unfortunately his Australian provider Iinet stopped hosting their customers websites and therefore something important disappeared. Luckily enough I was able to retrieve 98% of its content from Archive.org and decided set up a mirror of Stepho’s Toyota Site on my website. I was able to contact Wayne and got his approval for setting up a mirror. He confirmed his provider stopped doing webhosting and he’s currently looking for new hosting and overhauling his entire website. Until he has done so the mirror on this site will remain.
For those that are unfamiliar with Stepho’s Toyota Site, Wayne Stephenson created a website about Toyota as far back as 2000-ish. The webdesign feels even older than that and I’d say it’s more like 1997-ish, using free webcounters and webrings. (do you even remember those?) Wayne owned (or owns?) a 1977 Toyota Celica RA28 and a 1979 Carina TA45 in which he swapped a Lexus 1UZ V8. He shared all information he had on his website and slowly it became a rich resource of technical Toyota data. Over the decades he added more and more information and also visitors contributed their knowledge to his site.
I’m confident to say that almost any (older) technical Toyota resource has been “borrowing” knowledge from Wayne’s site. I’m a 100% sure that I did. A quick scan through my website shows I have at least three links to his site. Also on the AEU86 site we copied data from his site, put that in our Technical Reference and linked back to his site. I would say Wayne is one of those unsung internet heroes who put a lot of effort in making information available and sharing it with the community!
You may think setting up a mirror is a breeze. Just download the content and then put it online somewhere. If it were that easy, my life would have been a lot easier than that. The Archive.org keeps copies of the files and pages it crawled in the past, but that means that if it didn’t retrieve all files its copy isn’t complete. I wasn’t planning to go over the Archive.org and save each and every file individually. Luckily they have a page covering downloading a complete snapshot from the Archive.org and someone made a tool that would be able to download all files in such a snapshot. I extracted over 900 files from the Archive.org from the latest snapshot, but quickly found out it wasn’t complete.
While traversing through the contents I kept finding missing files, so one by one I looked up these files, extracted the snapshot-identifier and saved the files in this snapshot over the latest. Then I overwrote the html files with the ones from the latest snapshot. Unfortunately there are still files missing. Especially the missing Celica brochures is a huge loss.
I ended up keeping the mirror as close as possible to Wayne’s original site, but it was inevitable that I had to make a couple of alterations.
I had to remove the hyperlinks to the missing files from the html to prevent errors. I removed the webcounter and webring parts as the webcounter and webring both have disappeared a long time ago. Instead I added a Google analytics tag to keep track of the website and what files are still missing.
I hope Wayne is able to get new hosting soon!
I spotted this Toyota Chaser JZX100 Tourer V a few blocks down the road of my daughter’s new school. On the second day I brought her to school it was parked on one of the main roads and then the week after I found it parked in this smaller road.
The Tourer V trim level should already explain that this car is powered by a 1JZ with a turbo. This means it’s top of the line of the Chaser X100 family!
The rims appear to be 7-spoke aftermarket items and I have to admit I don’t immediately recognize them. However, I’m sure someone in the comments will.
The front spoiler, side skirts and rear skirts are all part of the dealer options as you can see below:
And also the rear spoiler on the top of the rear window is part of the dealer options:
The rear trunk/bootlid spoiler is not the same as the one found in the 1996 brochure. However, this Chaser JZX100 was sold in 1999 and it could be that the rear spoiler changed over the years when it was sold.
The big canon tailpipe must make a nice deep growl and I would love to hear/see this car drive in person! If you want, you can follow the owner on Instagram under his name @the_sjeeser. That name is actually a pun in Dutch as “sjeezen” means driving real hard!
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