THE TRUE SCHOOL
Mention the words ‘Japan’ and ‘golden era’ in the same breath, and a single glance around the room should be adequate to properly grasp the gravity of that utterance among a crowd of tuner-car faithful. The images conjured are evocative. A JZA70 Supra with the hammer down, the whistle of a T51R turbo escalating as it streaks along the Bayshore Route. The guttural growl of an R33 GT-R spooling up a pair of GT3540s before busting into the nine-second zone at Sendai Hi-Land. Top-tier D1GP grids packed with barking SR20s, throwing down multi-car trains in liveries as wild and colourful as the drivers personalities. They’re all tied together with names like Top Secret, Veilside, HKS, GReddy — tuning badges of honour that came to epitomise a generation.
It’s an era that skirts the fine line between analogue and digital, with engine tuning fairly rudimentary, and technology evolving at pace. As the sun set over the ’90s and the 2000s dawned, Japan’s car culture was experiencing an absolute boom. Tuning houses would battle for supremacy, be it in the Auto Salon show hall or the Tsukuba ribbon. It’s an era of such passion and creativity that,
