AE86 meet August 6th, 2010 - Hachiroku day

 

Let’s get this straight. I am not a fanboy of Initial D, and I am not a drifter. When I was younger I owned two of these cars and I have never since felt the pure pleasure of driving as I have in these cars, and I have driven a lot of fast cars. 

 

For people who have driven one, you might know what I am talking about. The soul of the car is important and this car is full of it.

 

I am not a professional photographer and I do not own a DSLR camera. I shot these photos from a Canon IXY 920is. It is a $300 point and shoot made for people who want simplicity and compact size more than functions. Anyone who has shot at night knows how hard it is without a nice lens. I shot these photos with a $15 tripod and between 1.3 and 2.5 second exposure.

 

 

I arrived late that night since work was busy. I pulled in at 8:30 and despite a small turnout, there were plenty of cars coming in and going out for a quick run on the wangan. No matter what time you go to Daikoku there is something to look at and this time it is 86s.

 

 

The first thing that caught my eye was a pair of clean Levins. Both in Panda two tone. One was a coupe, the other a hatch. The owners were two older men in their 40s who were friends.

 

 

The Levin is the AE86 with the fixed headlights and is a bit more interesting to me since us Canadians (and Americans) never got the Levin. Beside the headlights and the detail work this model was identical including the wonderful 4-age motor but more on that later.

 

 

Everyone has their favourite body style. The hatch is the more recognized shape but the coupe holds it’s own as being a bit more quirky and is a few kg lighter. You can also nab a coupe for less money since more people want Takumi’s ride.

 

 

I just can’t get past the looks of these cars. For some reason, it is the only car that I actually smile when I see it every time. It is well proportioned and the lines are clean and simple with a dash of 80s transformer thrown in.

 

It is wonderful to drive due to great communicativeness and a wonderful engine. The car is a great car to learn how to drive on since it is a challenge to drive quickly. The engine needs to stay in the narrow powerband between 6400 and 7500 rpm, and manipulating the weight balance is crucial to getting it to turn right. The car is fond of letting the driver know about its limits by going into understeer slightly before the back end moves out linearly.

 

 

The car has a short wheelbase for a RWD car and has a large rear overhang with the engine being pushed right next to the firewall. This gave the little car a nice weight balance.

 

Contrary to popular belief, this is not an easy car to drift. The underpowered engine combined with a solid rear axle and chassis limitations meant that it is hard to hold a drift for any length of time and transitions are snappy.

 

 

The best part of these two Levins was the man who owned the coupe. He was middle aged and knew cars very well. He smoked a cigarette which he held in his mouth when he spoke and kept his low voiced responses to a minimum… Sorry for being a nerd but he was Bunta from Initial D. 

 

 

The Trueno on the other hand was the pop-up headlight version of the AE86. I admit that I have a soft spot for pop-up headlights. There is something quintessentially 80s about these. Like early morning aerobics and large hair, we never see these anymore. Vehicle safety regulations and advances in headlight design have eliminated them. RIP yet another cool thing from the 80s. If only we saw sportscars screaming around corners early before Saturday morning cartoons, the eighties would be remembered better.

 

 

Black is my favourite colour for the AE86. It is dark and aggressive. It also fits with the lines well. This one has a nicely complementary body kit and if you look closely, you can see the pulled front fender zip-tied to the bumper in true AE86 fashion. Don’t miss the license plate..

 

 

The rear end nicely matches the front end. In my opinion, these cars look best from the rear. I never got to meet the owner of this car but I wanted to take a peek under that vented carbon fibre hood to see what he was running.

 

 

The mood and the atmosphere were excellent. Daikoku is always a great place to hang out but tonight was special. As I stated, most of the 86 owners were a bit older so it was an excellent opportunity to sample what the car culture was like in the past. These guys got to see the birth of the sport compact tuning and street racing culture. These same people may have been racing the touge routes before some of us were born. Now that’s culture.

 

A usual, it was easy to walk up to anyone and start up conversation. There was no feeling that these men had any worry that the new age of tuning was moving away from what they built.

 

 

This 86 was the star of the night. He came with a group of two other 86s which were all tuned completely differently. This one obviously stood out due to the crazy body modifications and extreme stance.

 

 

The owner said that the kit was all one off and customs build for him. This included a TRD N2 style kit that was about 2 inches wider than the original. There was also heavy use of carbon fibre all around including some very interesting aero above the windows. Perhaps good for cutting through the air at high speeds but the owner showed me another great use while he had his canned beverage resting on it.

 

 

I really felt good about this car. As you can see, the kit has dents and rock chips on it, proof that he used this car the way that it was meant to be used. The owner mentioned that the kit was not cheap by any means so I’m glad that he is getting his money’s worth out of it, and not being afraid of scuffing it.

 

 

His friend to the right had a gold coloured Levin that was fantastic. I will be the first to admit that gold is not my favourite car colour but it fit well on this car. It also turned out nicely in the pictures with my low quality camera.

 

 

The fitment of the wheels with the CBY style fenders was just right. I love to look of the semi-slick Yokohamas sticking out of the cut in fenders. The wheels win my prize for the best of the night. Very deep dish Watanabes are awesome and these were perfectly matched to the car.

 

 

The car was clean all the way around. This would be a nice compromise for a street car. It looks capable and yet streetable.

 

 

I asked the driver if he could take me for a spin when he goes out but he was heading over to Umihotaru next and I couldn’t leave my car at Daikoku so I had to settle with just a picture of the owner.

 

 

Here is the typically awesome owner. I promise you, if I see this car again, I will get a ride… something tells me that I wouldn’t get to drive his pride and joy though.

 

 

The night went on and the hanging out continued. In this picture you can see the evolution of the Tureno. To the left of the 86 is an AE111, the last Trueno. Despite changing from RWD to FWD right after the 86, the Trueno continued to be a quick light car. Thanks to it, we got the Blacktop 4-age too. Engine swap anyone?

 

 

These two cars offer a bit of perspective in the AE86 world. Both were owned by exceptional owners who cared for their cars but both had very different lives.

 

 

The green one was saved after an accident by the owner. It had serious rust in the chassis and engine bay. It was missing the bumper, fenders were damaged, and the interior was ripped out. This was an ex-race car with a blown engine that the owner took it upon himself to fix. It now sports new panels, interior, and engine.

 

 

The stretched tires and seriously wide fenders really show the intent of this car.

 

 

The white one on the other hand gathered attention since it was a very clean example. It had low kms, was moderately tuned and the whole body was very light on the imperfections. This was a prime example of what the car might have looked like 20 years ago.

 

The two cars were like twins that were raised by different parents and are now just reuniting. Both have had very different lives but these cars are alike in their owner’s love for them.

 

 

This goes to show the diversity on how this car is tuned. Whether it is for show or track, this car is loved by the owners like no other car I see. The owners have excellent stories and the cars have wonderful tales to tell.

 

 

The thing is, these cars have what many new cars are missing. Sure the AE86 is as powerful as many of the economy cars of today. But one thing this car has is a lot of soul. Cars today are highly demanding in their production limits. Accountants say they are too expensive, marketers say they can make more profit if it targets a different demographic. Shareholders demand that companies grow every year so it makes it tighter and tighter to make a profit. Toyota was built on cars like this and the Supra but has not one sportscar in its lineup now.

 

 

Cars today have had the soul sucked out of them and we are sadly moving towards appliance vehicles. Here is hope that the FT-86 can bring some of that back. The car industry needs to make vehicles that will be loved 25 years down the road like this one…

 

 

Cars that will spark the imagination and could single handedly take a manga series to international fame. If Takumi delivered tofu in a Scion TC or a Hyundai Genesis, would we feel the same way about these cars? Yes, they’re good cars but not cultural revolutions.

 

Or still be used heavily in motorsports. They are winning despite having less than half the power of the competitors.

 

 

Toyota used to have the best engines in the world. The 4age from Toyota and Yamaha had a big part in proving the popularity of the twincam design. Now most production engines are twincams. Toyota was making more power in a 1.6 litre then some 4.0 litres of the time were making.

 

 

I didn’t have time to tie each engine to the specific cars that I saw, nor did I get to see all of them but I did get to see quite a few. The most common engine I saw was the Blacktop 20 valve from the AE111. This 1.6 litre was the most advanced 4age that Toyota made. It had very lightweight forged internals, 5 valves per cylinder, and individual throttle bodies per cylinder. It also had an early version of Toyota’s variable valve timing making 165 hp.

 

Although power numbers were not what Honda had at the time from their B16a, the engine could rev up and down very quickly and seemed to have a direct connection between putting your foot on the gas pedal, and the tach jumping up. Response was the name of the game here.

 

 

Here is a first generation engine from either a bluetop or redtop but I can’t tell since the valve covers have been replaced. The exhaust manifold is called “takoashi” or octopus legs. This is similar to the bundle of snakes term we use in English. It has also been upgraded with ITB as the original bluetops had a standard joined intake system. Check out the scaffolding used to secure the AE86’s wet noodle chassis. I like how the strut bar attaches to the fenders and firewall.

 

 

Here we see another Blacktop with individual filters on each velocity stack. The owner let me stick my head into the engine bay as he actuated the throttle. The engine sucks in air so furiously through those filters. No other cars quite sound like it. 

 

It was surprising that I didn’t see a turbo 4age. It is common for people to turbo “the little engine that could” to get as much out of it as possible. When NA tuning maxes out at about 240 hp (and gets very expensive at that point), turbo is a common way of bringing more fire to the party.

 

 

By 9:30 it was time to go. The police were recommending us to leave as was expected. I was invited to continue the meet at the Umihotaru (ocean firefly) parking lot on a man-made island in Tokyo bay but my time was up and I didn’t want to be up all night. That and 3000 yen ($30) for entry into Umihotaru is a bit steep.

 

Some of the drivers said that they were going for high speed runs later in the night once the roads clear out. I would love to be there for that but in my Skyline, but I would like it more to be there in my old AE86.

 

One thing I really liked about this meet was that everyone there was just owners who love the car. This is a big change from the standard car show where shops bring their show cars and walking from one $100,000 machine to the next makes you numb to wonderful cars. These people drive these cars every day and have built them up to how they want them. It had a very personal feel… Like we were 20 years in the past before the explosion of the tuning scene.

 

It was an excellent night.

 

Derek