There’s no better way to kick off the new year, automotive wise, then with the Tokyo Auto Salon (TAS), the Mecca for JDM aficionados. While we are still scheduled for weekly therapy sessions to treat the severe depression from not being able to attend TAS, Zerotohundred.com’s close friend and proprietor of Motorsport Playground, Remus, was reporting live from location and was kind enough to let us share some of his shots with you.
The sheer size and variety at TAS just puts it on another level compared to other international motor shows or auto expos. No other motor show or expo will have so much from so many different avenues on display in once central location.
We will be putting up a few posts to highlight the different things that Remus caught as he navigated the Makuhari Messe.
First up is a Daihatsu Copen riding the green colour scheme from a Porsche GT3 RS, similar to the Mini Cooper S from the Malaysian chapter of Europrojektz.
GReddy were on hand too with a huge showcase of their tuning catalogue. Naturally, their focus this year around was primarily on the Nissan GT-R with this new titanium exhaust system stealing the show. You can’t go wrong with burnt tips for an exhaust.
Next up is Veilside, that brought along their Toyota Supra fitted with the 4509GTR full body kit. The thing looks like it eats little children for breakfast and small animals for appetisers. It’s probably not to everybody’s taste but you just can’t deny the visual impact it has.
Flying the home flag proud, there were a number of Proton Satria Neos on display at the Cusco stand. It was a tie-up between the local carmaker and Japanese suspension manufacturer, with the latter producing some suspension components for the former.
The usual array of slammed VIP rides were on hand too, getting more and more ridiculously low every year. This particular Toyota Crown Majesta from D’Custom Freak was getting quite a bit of attention and rightly too so.
Rotary tuner RE Amemiya unveiled their new time attack machine, an FD3S with a 20B triple-rotor lump under the hood.
It was reported too that Naoki Nakamura of Team Burst was arrested again for illegal street drifting. The subsequent sentencing saw him lose his license for two years apart from a hefty fine. Obviously, the D1 Corporation was not happy with this and has banned him indefinitely from competing in the D1 Grand Prix and D1 Street Legal series. Furthermore, a number of D1 Corporation people were spotted removing the D1 windscreen banners from Nakamura’s car that was on display at the D-Max booth.
A wide body-kitted RX-7 FC3S with some very aggressive aero parts fitted.
The kei truck madness continues to spread across Japan, with this totally slammed example riding on air suspension catching quite a number of stares.
A Tsukuba stormer, the Scorch Racing Silvia S15, was also on display, parading its new dry carbon fiber front fenders and revised aero on the front bumper. Suzuki-san, the owner and driver of the car, hopes to dip into the 54-second range with these mods.
Luxury and VIP tuner D.A.D brought a total stunner to TAS, their totally blinged out Mercedes-Benz SL. This thing is on the wish list of every rapper worth his rhyme and has been cautioned as a threat to people with photo-sensitive epilepsy.
Blitz had their GT-R demo car on display. Hopefully, we will be able to see this thing in action in D1 this year.
One of the more eye-catching rides on display had to be this bagged Audi A6 from Artis that was wrapped in an alligator-skin like vinyl.
In a fresh move that hasn’t been pulled out of the playbook yet, G-Wiz yanked out the archaic lump from under the hood of a Nissan Sunny pickup and replaced with the entire powertrain from a Toyota Prius. So you now have the 1.5-liter petrol engine mated to an electric motor IMA under the hood of a 1979 Sunny pickup.
Lastly, we haven’t forgotten that the majority of our readers are testosterone-biased. So here’s a few shots of the estrogen-biased side of TAS.
