We break down the cost of our Japan in a Van road trip, give you a few handy tips for embarking on a similar journey and explain what’s coming next for the Juicebox channel.
Drifting Legends! We finish our Japan journey at the Battle Magazine Cup held at Nikko Circuit. We also get caught in a typhoon before heading back to Ireland! It’s been a blast making these videos and reliving the trip. Cheers for tagging along and enjoying the memories with us.
The sleep at Daikoku was pretty rough. Looking back, I don’t think we slept at all. The roads above Daikoku never ease off. It’s a constant stream of traffic 24 hours a day, not to mention people cruising into the car park at all hours revving cars. What did we expect?
Still, it was funny to say we slept there. Originally It Daikoku intended to be a rest stop for people passing by, so it made sense at the time. We needed to get to JDM Distro before 11 am, so here we were brushing our teeth in the toilet area and hitting the road to Saitama to the Distro Japanese warehouse.
That night, we decided we would work out way back towards Nagoya, stopping off in Hamamatsu for the night for a few beers and food and walk the city streets. We enjoyed the slightly slower pace of life this city had to offer.
After Feed, we had a quick stop by a shop called Racing Service Factor. They race in the one-make Civic series and the Vitz cup, and both cars had won the league races not too long before we arrived.
If you are over thirty, you’ll be well aware of Trial for their epic demo cars and long history with tuning. They have one of the largest shops in Japan and have been around for over thirty years. I was first acquainted with them in Max Power in both the magazine and their DVD Japan feature back in the day called “beast from the east”. Max Power was the most prominent UK tuning magazine in the early Millenium.
We decided to chance Signal Auto. Signal was one of our favourite shops growing up, and after finding in disbelief that their original store is still open and operational, we added it to the list.
One of the coolest Honda shops in Japan, Zero Fighter is packed with Race and Kanjozoku spec Civics. We head to the hills stopping in Osaka JDM and Full Stage along the way before receiving a very warm welcome from the staff at Zero Fighter in Nara.
Moving onto part two of the “Show” area. I’m not sure what you would even call this. As most of the cars in here were just well put together streetcars. The killer about having this many good cars side by side is you tend to overlook things. Each of these would be worthy of a closer look if they were out in the wild but I felt caught for time, you wanted to try to document as much as you could but you really only have a few hours. Even as I was shooting the cars in this area of the event, people were packing up and leaving.
I have hundreds of photos from 86 festival, and to be honest, I’m going to post most of them here on the website for others to enjoy. There’s always a severe amount of cars at these events, and with most other websites, people have a limit or try to cut down the size of a post to keep things to a digestible amount. Not here! I’m going to dump pretty much anything I thought was cool onto the site over the next few days, broken up into six different blog posts. Just so you guys can get a comprehensive look at what was arguably the most incredible event I’ve ever been to in my life.
Another show we made our way to in 2019, just before we left for Japan, was DB on the quay.
What I liked about this event was the dockside location and the varied mix of cars. Usually, our BBQ is primarily bringing Japanese machinery through the friends we have met over the years. I’ve always wanted to include more variety, but we seem to have a nack in creating bonds with people with the same interest, more specifically Japanese cars.
Ireland has a very diverse car culture, and sometimes it’s hard to bring a mixed bag of enthusiasts together as they tend to stay in their groups. We have a show called Japfest which promotes Japanese cars, and we have VW and old Ford events with a similar style, again usually bringing people from the same crowds together.
I’m not going to say a lot here, the images speak for themselves, here are the photos to accompany the Honda day from 2019 when we had the EK4 out on the track. It’s hard to put into words just how fun these noisy little Hondas are until you’ve driven one, and when you drive a proper sorted one the track on the limit, it only amplifies the pleasure in these Econo small cars. You can punish them, and they keep coming back for more!
The noise makes you feel like you are doing ten times the speed, the oversteer, the bang of Vtec lad! Honda knew what they were doing with the first twenty years of simplistic Vtec machines; anyways, ill leave it here. Hope you enjoy these pics.
– Neil
We check out a Mitsubishi Turbo Kei car you’ve probably never heard of called an “EK” this is not to be confused with a Civic. Josh get his M3 powered E30 running for the first time.
We head to Josh’s parent’s house to collect parts to fix the E36 only to encounter the rustiest RX7 ever.
Every year they hold two rally sprints in the business park. These always bring the variety of cars we would otherwise never encounter. It’s a scene we are not too connected with being honest. On any given day you are sure to see stuff like this MK2 Escort or EX WRC cars, we are fortunate to have some of the best roads for this sort of thing.