spike021's BRZ Adventures

[spike021]

Originally Posted by MCTeeJ

I'm sorry about your bad experience. I highly recommend James Martin of HRI Tuning. He's a real cool dude. I guess the story goes his car was one of the first in his area to equip a turbo kit from a local shop and his tuner ran into issue after issue. Eventually he decided to do it himself, was happy with the results, and started doing friends cars. After that it was word of mouth. I was tuned in person since i'm only a 2.5 hour drive away, but most of his business is actually e-tuning. I just figure since you already have the parts you might as well put your money to use. Truth be told a quality tune can be better for the cars power and reliability.

Sorry about the paragraph man, but I guess I just think you shouldn't let the bad experience get you down, and you should give it another shot.

Thanks! Yeah, it's just a bummer and the way people handled it made me lose trust in shops/tuners.

I've also heard about HRI from @tehShirt and another local friend. James definitely does sound like a smart and capable tuner.

I would say that's definitely someone I'll consider doing a tune with when I'm ready and feeling more comfortable.

[spike021]

Here's another set of photos from my Japan trip and visit to Tokyo Megaweb!

















Obviously can't embed over 100 photos, lol, so here are the rest:

https://imgur.com/a/fJCfqX3

[spike021]

Forgive me while I continue to flood my build journal with photos from Japan .

These are from the Toyota Automobile Museum in Nagoya! As with before, 102 photos is too many for a forum post, so at the end I'll have a link to the full album on Imgur!

I've been meaning to post these for months, because there are several super interesting cars that I got to see. Namely, the 2000GT "Bond car", the Toyota SERA, Toyota 7, and Lexux LFA, just to mention a few.

Here are about 10 of my favorites:


































Unfortunately these are all phone camera photos rather than fancy mirrorless Sony a6000 photos, but hope you enjoy!


And the full album:

https://imgur.com/a/rO9ZUqP

[spike021]

I suppose an update is in order!

Kind of a whirlwind past few months.

Looong and short of it is the car is doing much better. But there were some additional issues during that period and hopefully they're resolved now.

If I can feel 100% confident that the car's feeling good in the next couple of months, then I want to give flex fuel and a new set of headers a go.

In the meantime, last month I ended up going on a last minute trip back to Japan for two weeks! I got a new job and was lucky enough to have about 2.5 weeks of breaktime between the end date of the old job and start date of the new one! Fortunately I made it right before COVID-19 really blew up (what a great "memory" for this journal.. lol.).

Let's see if I can sum up the awesome experiences I made while there this trip!

(apologies in advance, some photos are completely awful but I still want to share them anyway!)

Let's begin with the 86/BRZ "meeting" I setup between a mix of a couple people I met last year and a few others I'd simply been communicating with over Instagram for the past year or two!





I rented the white 86 on the far left (second pic) from Toyota for the day/night.

The friend with the white 86, I've been following and he's been following me for two or so years now. Last year we met up at this location (Daikoku PA) and also met up the following day to drive Mt. Haruna (famously known as Akina in InitialD).

The one with the Hot Lava I met last year at Daikoku and we exchanged Instagram's to follow each other (he's a test driver and drives circuits and drifts fairly often).

The others I either only knew through IG up till this trip and the black BRZ tS (zenki version, not kouki) I met because he was invited by my new-ish friend with the Hot Lava.

People will laugh at the following, but it's so authentic to me...

There's almost nothing more thrilling than going to a parking lot and meeting other, like-minded friends in a far-off country where for the most part there's a huge language barrier.

We hung out there a while, and then since everybody was hungry so we decided we needed some food! So we caravan'd from Daikoku through Yokohama to this random ramen shop at like 10PM and had to find parking in this cramped 24h parking lot.

It's cool enough at home here to meet up with some friends who have twins and go driving around. But then to go to some foreign place and be welcomed into a group and do the same thing.. It was exhilarating.

That very same day, I also met someone that you _may_ be familar with from Option!, Best Motoring, etc.



Max Orido! Definitely a language barrier, but he was super chill and welcoming. He insisted on taking a 2nd photo later on after I asked about taking one photo with him for the memory.

He had an awesome customer car there that day too:






Later on in the trip, I decided to go to Osaka Automesse (basically the largest autoshows in Japan after Tokyo Auto Salon).

Just a few of the cars I saw:

(2021? BRZ STI Concept with the new wing and lip)

I'd love the lip, but it'd be absolutely dangerous where I live with the crap roads and bad driveways.

Honestly I wasn't sure about the wing when I first saw it on the internet back in January, but in person it's not bad. I think I just don't love the endplate shape.

Also, I don't think the paint was normal WRB; it was way more sparkly had more metallic flake than usual (maybe because it's meant to be a showroom model?).









Also (either Keiichi Tsuchiya's own hachiroku or one he's just driven on Best Motoring):



Special MF Ghost (InitialD spin-off or sequel manga in Japan) Toyota 86:



It's specially-built by Toyota and what I was told is that it's being toured around to the different major shows there and then to individual Gazoo Racing Garages (special racing/performance parts/service shops attached to some Toyota dealers in Japan).



The night before I went to Automesse in Osaka, I was staying in a hotel across the street from Intex (convention center) where the show would be held and decided to go to a 7/11 convenience store for some snacks/drinks. It’s sort of an empty business park kind of area so I wasn’t expecting anything to be going on that time of night (maybe 9ish?). As I walked and turned the corner for the 7/11 into the parking lot, I noticed a group of people around a car with its hood propped. It was an older ae86 Levin (not pictured). Being the extrovert that I am (I’m really not haha) I decided I’d try chatting with them using Google Translate, because as with most of us I’m also a fan of the classic hachiroku. I ended up chatting with a few of them for about 45 minutes and learned that most if not all were students from Toyota Kobe (a college run by Toyota I think where students learn how to work on cars). They were there because they had another Levin in the actual show (pictured). This Levin, before they began working on it, had been rusted through, no longer running, etc. Their group was able to completely restore it, repaint it, everything. Even the seats inside the car felt brand new. And yes, it had the new-car smell.

The language barrier made things tough, but I made two more new friends from this group! One of them races gokarts/works at some kind of gokarting circuit. Very cool people and I was so surprised they'd want to keep in touch!




After Automesse, it began to pour heavy rain and I needed to walk/run about a mile from my hotel with all my things to the train station to head back to Tokyo.

Well, as I'm hurrying down a street, I look down a side street and see these three guys and their 86's:



I decided to hang a quick right and crash their party, haha. After some Google Translate back and forth about exchanging Instagram usernames since I was in a hurry, we all discovered I had already been following two of them and they'd been following me (and for quite a long time already).

Small world!

~~~

I saw this BRZ at Super Autobacs in Odaiba City, Tokyo.

Similar story, realized later on I'd been following him a while too but he had changed his car a bit since the last time I saw this IG photos:



Another 86 with rocket bunny kit that I saw on the street in Tokyo one day:



A cappucino:




An R33 Skyline :



A Celica, maybe?:



A Mazda / Autozam AZ-1




I have way more but it's nearly 3am, so as before, I'll be updating with more photos and stuff soon!

Thanks for following along!

[Clipdat]

Thanks for sharing all the stories and photos! I especially appreciate that you posted them all in full resolution, for all of my pixel peeping needs.

Loved hearing about the friends you made and the little adventures you went on. It sounds like it was an incredible trip. I'm a little jealous, but more than that, I'm really happy that you got to experience it!