Remembering Japanese cars from the past
This kind of amazed me: Toyota actually advertised touge drifting!!
This 1982 Starlet advertisement shows Ove Andersson drifting a Starlet down a mountain:
Only a year after this commercial they released the AE86 which became the icon for touge drifting. However nowadays Toyota keeps a lot of distance from most racing sports. Especially anything getting near road-racing, like drifting for example.
As you can see in the catalogue of S57-6 (June 1982) the Carina A6 featured in the Paris-Dakar rally. According to the Carina page on the Japanese Wikipedia it featured in 1981 and 1982. However I could not find any reference that they actually did attend in 1981, especially not on this list. I did find a Toyota Starlet attending Paris-Dakar.
I did find that Masaru Kubota and Masahiro Uchida joined Paris-Dakar in 1982 and 1983 with a Carina, and Kubota was driving the Starlet in 1981. They became 34th in 1982 but did not finish 1983.
They entered as a private team (no factory backup) in the normal unmodified class, so their Carina was almost bone stock!!
Perhaps the Japanese Wikipedia page is mistaken about the years, maybe the conversion from Japanese years was done wrongly or maybe they traveled to Paris before 1st of January and of course counted it as 1981. We’ll never know.
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