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Happy Holidays From SBV8!!

December 25, 2012

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And a Happy New Year!!

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Obscure Japanese Sports Car Of The Week: Kuruma (Inter Proto Series)

25/3/12, 3:44, 13085 Views (when posted) Gran Turismo has taught me much about Japanese sports cars, from "Midnight Purple" Skyline GT-Rs and the Toyota Supra to the Honda Beat and Mazda/Autozam AZ-1 and much more besides (JGTC FTW), which has made me something of a fan of them, as you might imagine. As such, this new one caught my eye. The only problem is that it's only been reported on in Japan, so bear with me while I tell you what I can work out about this, the "Kuruma", thanks to the trusty Google Translate...

Oh yeah, the Tommykaira ZZ came back as an EV

Eight(!) whole years ago on this blog, I was doing a series of articles, for my own amusement really, on obscure Japanese sports cars every week or so. It was called, ingeniously, Obscure Japanese Sports Car of the Week. I didn't end up doing that many, but I do like having the articles up as a source on the off chance someone looks the car up or if they ever come up in conversation. Well, would you know, one such car has cropped up in conversation in a couple of corners of Car Twitter over the past week: the TommyKaira ZZ (read my original article here ). An original ZZ from the late 1990s When I originally traced the history of the ZZ in 2012 – and found it to be a history of almosts, so to speak, wherein every attempt to get the car into production ended within a couple of years through financial disaster – the box-section aluminium underpinnings and fibreglass body had just been repurposed by an engineering start-up founded by Kyoto University graduates, called Green Lord...

The Transport Research Laboratory's Test Track is now a Woodland Walk

The Transport Research Laboratory, apparently nestled between Beijing and Muzzy's landmark Kebab Van Having had to find and rotate between different routes around the same streets on my 'Government-approved outside hour' walks for the past two months (or is it three months? Or has it been 84 years?), finding a new walking location is quite pleasing, especially if it acts as an excuse to get the car out for a bit in order to travel there. A few days ago, though, I found out about one I wouldn't have expected: the site of the old TRL test track in Crowthorne. A British Pathé report showing the vast central area of the facility (1963) The Transport Research Laboratory as an entity has existed in various guises since 1933, when it was established (then as the 'Road Research Lab') by the Ministry of Transport in response to the rise of the horseless carriage. Since then it has been used for testing new ideas around infrastructure (road signs, lights, jun...

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