Remembering Japanese cars from the past
There are some questionable memorabilia that I own. Like for instance an unused official Toyota Carina notepad with Sonny Chiba and Kayoko Kishimoto riding on top of a 3A-II engine. Yes, that sounds more bizarre than it actually is, but I digress… I found this Toyota 3T-GTEU ashtray for sale on Mercari and I was stunned by its price: 166 dollars!
It does look very similar to the 3T-GTEU head. For comparison, here is an image of a Bond-girl hugging a 3T-GTEU engine:
Continue readingWelcome to JDM Trivia #12 where I describe the Toyota Carina A60 history.
![Toyota Carina A60 history [JDM Trivia]](https://www.banpei.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/jdm-trivia-12-toyota-carina-a60-history.jpg)
The Toyota Carina A60 started its life when Toyota decided to combine the platforms of the Corona, Carina and Celica. This delivered a floorpan that was identical for all three cars and some of the Corona and Carina body panels are even exchangeable.
This generation of the Toyota Carina was produced between September 1981 and April 1988. For Toyota this was considered to be a very long lasting production. It obviously helped that the Carina derived van stayed into production till April 1988, but also the sedan and coupe were available till the end of 1987. Continue reading
I scanned this picture of a girl hugging a Toyota 3T-GTE engine from a Toyota Corona TT142 brochure. The borchure was inside one of the Kaikki Karina magazines I bought recently:
I’m not entirely sure I should call it hugging… It is more a bit like she cherishes the engine, or feeling a great affection to it and she also caresses the intake with her left hand. Now I that engine must have
It is a bit less odd if you take into account that the Toyota Corona T140 series got promoted heavily by Roger Moore who was back in 1982 still the actor that played James Bond.
Looking at this photo 33 years later makes the girl look a bit silly, or even a bit sexist photo on how to sell your high performance engines. Then again: James Bond likes classy stuff and the 3T-GTE was certainly a classy engine in the early 80s!
I found this video of a Bisimoto tuned 3T-GTE engined Carina TA14 on a set of SSR Longchamp xr4s.
That sound is like music to my ears!
The sound of this 3T-GTE is one of the most amazing sounds I’ve heard so far!
If you wonder what the engine is: it is the Toyota 1.8 litre 3T engine with a Yamaha DOHC head slapped upon it. It was a quite normal practice for Toyota to do such a thing to beef up their normal engines. However if that wasn’t enough the Yamaha head featured dual spark and Toyota added a big Toyota CT-20 turbo charger on top of it. The 3T engine normally produced somewhere between the 70 and 105 hp (depending on the market and amount of carbs), but this turbo charged dual spark dual overhead cam beauty managed to squeeze out 160hp! Since Toyota kept the six cylinders to the Celica XX alone this 160hp engine was featured in the normal Celica and (lucky enough) its sister models Carina and Corona. Now if only I could lay my hands upon one! ;)
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