Just by pure chance after the shoot with the AE111 Levin, a fog rolled in that evening and Barry had just put the finishing touches on his freshly painted R32 Skyline. We were cooking on the BBQ and I felt it would be rude not to grab some shots of this beauty while we had such an epic background.
We managed to get our first sizable amount of sleep since landing in Japan as I was pretty eager to get up early and hit a few shops in the surrounding area before we made our way up to Ebisu. A little digging around led us a strip which has some of our all time favorite shops. The main ones we wanted to visit in Nagoya were Kids heart and Garage defend, the guys from MCR factory were away so that was out…
After a day of car hunting, we had to make our way back down to Himeji. We would be pimping out the van with some ordered parts in Up garage the following day.
So for the people who have been following our trip to Japan so far, quite a lot of this will be car related (as you may have guessed). This holiday was planned out as a car holiday, so it’s going to be an automotive heavy story throughout.
We found it hard to sleep the first night. The anticipation was a little overwhelming. I haven’t had that many situations as I grew old where I had butterflies like being a kid, excited about the unknown of what you may encounter the next day, imagination was running wild.
Shoes are such a massive part of building a car, they can make or break a look. Finding the right shoes in a sea of similar builds can be such a daunting task. This Godzilla was already wearing a set of shoes which were almost impossible to replace, TE37’s finished in gold.
As most of us tend to stay in our circles amongst the scene, a lot of cars never really come out of hiding for us to be exposed to here at Juicebox. This little B series is stunning.
Being away for a few years I really didn’t know what top expect at Japfest this year, if you were following the nonsense on the Instagram story, we went a little over board but it was with no regrets. Japfest an end of year calendar for most of the stuff we are into and most of the cars either come off of the road or go into hibernation for the winter.
A lot of people made it down regardless of situations that sprang up which either on the day or close to it. Somehow the weather was on our sides which enticed people to make the journey down. I genuinely would not have held the event if there was a monsoon of Irish rain.
Where to begin really? This whole thing started as an idea few weeks back, well a concrete idea that is. This plan literally fell into place in less than ten days.
Sometimes you never know what you are going to get in an email. A couple of months back we received an email from a young fan of the site telling us about how his father owns not one but two Nissan GTR’s. In Ireland the GTR is not exactly a common site to begin with so after a quick exchange of details we decided to pack the car and head to Cashel to check this out for ourselves. I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing; this was a pretty awesome sight to behold.
On a drive through the land of cheese aka Michelstown Co Cork we stumbled upon this stunning Gold GTR as it pulled out of a service station and headed off down the road. Like a child over reacting we tried our hardest to track down the owner in the next 30 minutes just to have a chat with him as you don’t see these beauties very often on the roads any more due to the Irish government screwing people for Tax. After a bit of help we managed to track down the owner and have a small chat, took a photo of the car which is one of the nicest BNR32’s we’ve ever come across sitting on a set of CST Hyper wheels I haven’t seen to many pairs of over the years seen here an a very delicious offset. Always nice to be surprised by a 32 GTR, and even better when its a stunner, more on this work in progress over the coming year!
The R32 is by far one of the most popular cars to come out of Japan. The BNR32GTR is by far one of the best cars ever made; it was almost unbeaten in the N1 category in Japan during its reign of terror. The car really pushed what was possible handling and electronics wise at that time. What is so good about this R32 Skyline is that it started life as an a lower base model, the GTS-T sporting an RB20DET and a Rear wheel drive setup. The lower model R32’s always lived in the shadow of the higher spec GTR model amongst hardcore Skyline Fans, but that didn’t stop anyone’s visions of creating the perfect R32 without having a GTR. This GTS-T was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.
It was that time of year again to head from the very south of Ireland up to the north. Straight liners was about to begin again and we expected another turbo journey to lay ahead of us. Surprising enough this time around all the new motorways had been fully open and we actually made it from Waterford to Enniskillen in about 3 hours abiding by the speed limit. This is one of the most exciting drag racing events in Ireland, well to be honest there isn’t too many. The best thing about Straighliners is the fact that you just don’t know whats going to show up.
