JDM Trivia number 10: Japanese Car Family Album Treasures
As it is the tenth trivia I wanted to do a bit more light weight subject and not dive into the nerdy anorak topics like sidewipers or hachi roku panda paint schemes. Today will be about the photos you see in the background and I call them family album treasures. These photos could be sourced from anyones family album and that’s why I named them this way.
Japanese car and person
These photos have two things in common: in the photo there is at least one Japanese car and person on it. There could be multiple cars, multiple people, or even whole families! And all of them are proud owners of their cars and like to pose in front of it. Or maybe next to it? Or maybe sitting inside the car? Or maybe sitting on its roof? Or maybe even posing like a hunter after you shot your R32 GTS-t into the guardrail? Continue reading
Today’s trivia will be all about the TOM’S Angel T01. Gred_cz guessed the teaser entirely correct: the car in the teaser clip is indeed the TOM’S Angel T01 and the tail lights are indeed borrowed from the E90 generation Corolla FX. I recognized the car in the video from my Gran Turismo 2 days when this car was one of the prize cars you could obtain if you won the Pure Sports Cars Cup located on Laguna Seca Raceway.
TOM’S
TOM’S always has been a tuning garage where they take an existing car, only Toyota in their case, strip and modify it into a high performance race car, or a de-tuned street version.
Mid engined sports car
You could argue that TOM’S counterpart for Nissan would be Tommy Kaira. They also take mostly Nissan cars and modify them into high performance race cars. The analogy even goes further: both have made an attempt to create their own light weight mid-engined sports car from the ground up. Both of them had their mid-engined sports cars manufactured in Great Britain. For Tommy Kaira that car was named the ZZ while TOM’S attempt was named the Angel T01. Continue reading
I expected people to jump on the Fujiwara Tofu livery of the Corolla E80 sedan and I was right about that. Actually I wasn’t aiming for the Initial D inspired sticker but rather for the panda AE86 paint scheme applied to it. Why? Well because the two tone panda paint scheme of the AE86 is actually quite subtle and it is easy to make mistakes in it.
Panda AE86 paint scheme
To get started, and sorry if you already know this, but there are two types of the hachi roku: the Toyota Corolla Levin and the Toyota Sprinter Trueno. The former has fixed square head lights while the latter has 70s and 80s style popup head lights. Both of them featured in two body styles: 3 door hatch back and 2 door sedan. People also refer both as a coupe as they have been marketed as a coupe in various regions. However according to the Toyota firewall ID plates the real coupe is the 3 door hatchback and the 2 door sedan is called a hardtop. But enough about introducing even more confusion… Continue reading
Eventhough the Toyota 2000GT wasn’t entirely 100% Toyota as Yamaha built all of them, including the all aluminium body and the double overhead cam heads. Still the Toyota 2000GT was recognized as the first Japanese super car and it impressed the international press of what Japan and Toyota were capable of.
This Toyota 2000GT is an early 1967 left hand drive model and is part of the Louwman collection and exhibited in the Louwman museum in The Hague. You can tell it is an early model by the larger driving lamps, the shape of the front turn signal lamps and the smaller rear turn signal lamps.
The owner, Evert Louwman, also owns another early left hand drive model 2000GT (you can’t have enough 2000GTs!) which is exhibited in the Dutch Toyota museum in Raamdonksveer. A fun fact is that the 2000GT never got exported to the Netherlands. The car in the museum in The Hague has been imported in 2006 while the one in the museum in Raamdonksveer had been imported already in 1976. That also means he owns two out of the 85 left hand drive 2000GTs.
Did I already mention he likes rare and exclusive cars?
Rare and exclusive cars
Let’s go quickly through the checklist:
Steve McQueen’s 1971 Baja Buggy? Check!
One of the original James Bond Aston Martin DB3s used in Goldfinger? Check!
Lexus LFA with serial number 001? Check!
Toyota 7 Turbo race car? Check!
Only remaining Toyota AA dragged from a Russian barn? Check!
Dr. Shoichiro Toyoda’s company Century? Check!
Dr. Shoichiro Toyoda’s desk? Check!
We can only dream of owning one single car out of such an amazing collection!
If you ever are in the neighborhood of The Hague or The Netherlands I can definitely recommend visiting the museum!
The address of the museum is:
Louwman Museum
Leidsestraatweg 57
2594 BB
The Hague
The Netherlands
(the Dutch Toyota Museum is a private collection which you can only visit upon invitation)
The feedback I got from the picture I posted was great! Some people suffer from Pareidolia just like me. Pareidolia is when you see faces in everything and some of you saw angry and happy faces in the photo. But what I actually was aiming for were the swapped tail lights on the kaido racer in this photo. Some of the commenters already uncovered me as the person behind the Bosozoku Style blog and yes that’s me. In the kaido racers scene swapping parts between various cars is a highly valued modification, especially if it something original.
Kaido Racer part swaps
I haven’t done any statistics on this but I can say the most swapped parts are the tail lights of a Nissan Cherry X-1R and most of them end up on either a Skyline C110 or C210.
Second most swapped parts are the banana tail lights of the first generation JDM Toyota Celica liftback and it is unbelievable how well they look on Glorias, Fairladies, Skylines and Laurels. It is almost like the Nissan owners are jealous of this magnificent Toyota design.
What’s better than Keiichi Tsuchiya wishing you a Merry Christmas?
I can’t imagine *any* family album treasure being better than this!
As you may have noticed I’ve created an account on CartThrottle and that’s also where I found this little gem! Big thumbs up to Randomkoala for finding this!
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