Tag: Honda S2000

Sanctuaries Initial D Fujiwara Tofu Shop

Sanctuary: the Initial D Fujiwara Tofu shop (Haruna)

January 14, 2014 / banpei / 0 Comments

Yes, a new idea/section/regular just emerged: sanctuaries!
Why? Well basically last night I suffered from insomnia and for whatever reason my mind wandered to the original Initial D Tofu shop which is located in Shibukawan next to Mount Haruna (the town called Akina in Initial D) and that the original tofu shop has been demolished about three years ago. This is the photo Alexi took to prove it has been demolished:

So I was wondering how many fanboys actually posed (or their cars) in front of the tofu shop when visiting Shibukawan or Mount Haruna, so here is a whole gallery of cars, tofu shops and people posing in front of it!

Also in case you are wondering where to find the place, this is the location on Google Streetview: Continue reading

DOTS: local Laurel C31

September 2, 2012 / banpei / 1 Comment

Sortly before I went on holiday I spotted some J-tin driving in front of me. Unmistakably it turned out to be a red Datsun Laurel C31.

Also note the Honda S2000 I featured over two years ago on the right side of the photo.

At the bottom of the hill the Laurel was trapped at the traffic lights and I was able to shoot a close up photo: Continue reading

Japanse Autosport Festival: Traffic jams and parking lot

April 30, 2012 / banpei / 0 Comments

As promised: lots of pictures are coming up!

The day started early somewhere in Hilversum where we met up at Jack’s place at 7:30. I was perfectly on time for a change, but stupidly enough I forgot to bring along my tickets and had to go home and print them out another time. Then after 45 minutes of driving we arrived in Zandvoort and encountered this near the gate of the circuit:

It took us another 45 minutes to actually reach the gates. :o

This also meant one of the cars in our group ran into a little bit of trouble when its radiator hose snapped: Continue reading

DOTS: Two more Toyota FJ Cruisers

July 4, 2010 / banpei / 0 Comments

As I said last week in the Honda Beat DOTS: I would come back to the FJ Cruiser parked behind it… Well I want to talk about this yellow FJ Cruiser first:

Yellow 2008 Toyota FJ Cruiser
I spotted it parked a few villas away from the 2005 light blue Honda S2000. I took some quick photos of it and put it aside (for better times…) and didn’t think about it for some time. Combined with the pictures of another yellow 2008 FJ Cruiser it was able to make it as a posting!

Here another snapshot of the Honda Beat together with the yellow FJ Cruiser:

Another yellow 2008 Toyota FJ Cruiser
Even though they are both yellow and delivered in 2008 the two yellow FJ Cruisers are not the same car! This second FJ Cruiser had a different license plate and according to the RDW it had been converted to run on LPG. Somehow that sounds like a sane idea to me! :D

Another yellow 2008 Toyota FJ Cruiser
I think the huge number of FJs is due to the fact that the part of the Netherland I live in is quite popular for the rich and famous… FJ Cruisers are especially known as a fashion product, so I can imagine their popularity around here… But I never expected to spot three of them within just a few months time apart!

DOTS: S2000 hunting!

June 6, 2010 / banpei / 1 Comment

Ever since I started doing the Miata Hunting I always wondered why the Miata is so ubiquitous while I couldn’t find a single Honda S2000… For some reason I just didn’t spot them, up till three weeks ago when I spotted three S2000s within one week!

I must confess I already spotted this S2000, but since it was parked in a terrible spot (where you can hardly stop and shoot a picture) it took a while before I had the opportunity to make this shot:

DOTS: 2005 light blue Honda S2000
Unfortunately the owner parked the car the wrong way around… :(

On my way back from where I shot the Suzuki Cervo SC100 I spotted this dark blue Honda S2000:

DOTS: 2006 dark blue Honda S2000
Since the owner was already sitting in the driver seat I reckoned he would be taking off soon. I grabbed my camera which still had a manual focus 135mm lens on it and tried to get the focus right as quickly as possible. The driver took off the minute I started to set the focus and I tried to get a lucky shot. I guess I spent all my luck on the SC100 that day: I managed to get three shots and the above is the best shot of those three…

The saturday after I got lucky again: while doing groceries I spotted this red S2000 AP1 in the same carpark as where I spotted a red Miata before:

DOTS: 2002 red Honda S2000
It is an early model from 2002 and I used the door of the Carina as a tripod (actually the Carina would qualify as a quadpod! :P) to get a couple of nice shots. I liked this shot the best: as a nice touch it shows the front fender of the Carina in the foreground.

I don’t think the S2000 hunting will ever get a part two: in my experience the S2000 is about twelve times rarer than the Miata. With that in mind it would take me another 36 Miatas before I can post about the S2000 again. ;)

Motoharu Kurosawa driving the Nurburgring Nordschleife

January 25, 2009 / banpei / 0 Comments

Yesterdays posting about Motoharu Kurosawa made me wonder what videos I could find about Motoharu Kurosawa. I did find a lot of videos from which I like this video the most:

It is Gan-san doing an almost flat out round on the Nurburgring Nordschleife with a Honda S2000 prototype! Imagine that the whole S2000 wasn’t available back then and it must have attracted a lot of attention back then. If you look careful enough on the last seconds of the video a large part of the car was wrapped in covers so the press wouldn’t see its final shape!

As you can see the car is very fast! It passes a lot of motorcycles with great ease and he drives several times at the limit, sometime losing control just a tad bit. But during most of the run he remains seated very calm.

The run isn’t timed, but it is somewhere around the 8:45. If you look at the laptimes you will see that it around the same laptime as Horst von Saurma did with a S2000. But it is nowhere near Gan-san’s own record of 7:56 with the NSX-r.