There were a lot of eye-catching builds at HIN 2019, but a lot of it felt empty. Style was king, many builds threw the same combinations together and there was a certain air of insincerity with a lot of the entrants. Wanting e-fame and notoriety isn’t a bad thing, but it leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth when it seems to be the be-all and end-all to one’s involvement in automotive. The advent of influencers, social media and particular brands that promote attention-seeking in the name of “self-expression” doesn’t help either.
There were two builds that stood out to me at Homebush last year, both of which garnered little to no attention from content creators. It’s a cycle that is perpetually negative, content creators get in the game now wanting to shoot those with clout so they can grow, which provides more exposure to those that necessary shouldn’t get any more. Just an opinion…
James’ 86 struck a chord when I walked past at HIN. I didn’t spend ten minutes ogling at the details, but there was a big hit of nostalgia as I walked past James and told him what a nice build it was.
Anybody involved in JDM knows exactly what he has built as soon as you lay eyes on the colour scheme. Panda Trueno, the icon of classic JDM, the muse for an entire culture, Drift King’s beloved FR chassis, an aura created through a fictional Japanese teen delivering tofu through the mountain passes each morning.
The car is an institution in itself, a vehicle so niche that most modern enthusiasts wouldn’t know it. Funnily enough though, James didn’t grow up a petrolhead. He’s anime first, growing up playing video games and watching a plethora of cartoons to pass his spare time, as do so many Asians growing up. Only when he got his license did his attention turn modification, “I had watched Initial D growing up, and when the Final Stage came out, it was the perfect inspiration for my first car”. Not something that I hear often, but I guess this is similar to going into cosplay, right?
A 30-year old Japanese econobox probably isn’t the ideal choice for someone just getting his P-plates, but James was unfazed. “This is my first car, and I knew what I wanted to do with it from day one” he told me as we shot on an early Saturday morning in Cabramatta.
It took James four years to get the car to its present state, having imported the car from Japan as an ex-drift missile. A full restoration doesn’t come quickly for someone just finishing high school and beginning a career (he’s still on his Ps). However, the end product is more than worth it, there are so many quirks with an 80s Japanese vehicle, and an Initial D replica that make this build such a happy one.
There’s the digital dash, which came with the vehicle (“I wanted to go analogue but the digital is so rare”). How about those colourful seats, original option? So eighties, so Japanese. Keen-eyed Initial D fans will notice the cupholder and cup above the radio, and the ItalVolanti Admiral Red Trim steering wheel.
James is enthused at the backstory for these little touches:
From the age of 13, Takumi woke up at 3:45AM to deliver tofu for his father’s business. The round trip was 40KM, with Takumi always rushing so he could grab an extra hour of sleep prior to school. During one of those deliveries, Takumi clumsily destroyed the tofu. When father Bunta found out, he was given a beating and told to not do something like that again, and place the cup of water as a tool to finesse Takumi’s driving ability.
Trueno logos are placed where they should be, identical 14″ genuine Watanabe wheels make up the four corners of the car, and combined with the ambience of Cabramatta, looked right at home underneath the gates. We would’ve been safer with people and traffic if we had shot at night, but Peter’s golden hour shots made moving the car back and forth for trucks worthwhile.
7AM in Cabramatta lends itself to a lot of senior citizens taking advantage of little traffic and smaller crowds, plenty of them found time to stop and have a look at a time capsule from the past. There was the man who waxed lyrical about his KE70, standing with us for ten minutes and talking all things Toyota. An elderly couple observed the photoshoot from afar, on the way to grab groceries but stopped to admire the period-correct combination that James has put together.
Then there were our contemporaries, including one man who stopped to tell me I had a “really clean build”, but also made the effort to walk over to James and say the same thing once I directed him to the car’s actual owner.
This two-tone Hachi is an attention grabber, not because it’s loud, slammed or wearing a new coat of paint. It doesn’t light the world on fire from an aesthetics standpoint, there isn’t anything incredibly “unique” in it and James is not the first in the world to do this, nor the last.
James’ car turns heads because it touches a memory that people young and old fondly remember. Whether it was someone’s beloved purchase as an adult, or the nostalgia of a millennial’s childhood, the AE86’s influence is real and tangible.
“This car often gets memed” James told me, which is disappointing but not exactly surprising. It’s not lit, doesn’t seem to be particularly creative and the captions on his posts aren’t incredible one-liners. The automotive industry seems to be on a knife’s edge, on the one hand more people are seeing it as a great creative outlet. On the other, we have people investing thousands of dollars into a vehicle to garner attention from others, building an online “influence” that is seen as success.
It’s fitting then, that a replica of a fictional vehicle elicits so much deep emotion from all that see it in the flesh.
