INITIAL D, for those touge lover's

Initial D (頭文字D, Inisharu Dī?) is a manga by Shuichi Shigeno which has been serialized in Kodansha's Young Magazine since 1995.

The anime and manga focus on the world of illegal Japanese street racing, where all the action is concentrated in the mountain passes and never in cities nor urban areas, and the drift racing style is emphasized in particular. Keiichi Tsuchiya helps with editorial supervision. The story is centered around the Japanese prefecture of Gunma, (mostly Shibukawa where Takumi's home is) more specifically on several mountains in the kanto area and in and their surrounding cities and towns. Although some of the names of the locations the characters race in have been fictionalized, all of the locations in the series are based on actual locations in Japan.

Set in the late 1990s in Japan's Gunma Prefecture, the series follows the adventures of Takumi Fujiwara, an eighteen year old who helps his father run a tofu store by making deliveries every morning to a hotel on Akina with his father's Toyota Sprinter Trueno GT-APEX (AE86). It is revealed that Takumi has been driving on Mt. Akina every morning to deliver Tofu to the summit five years before he even had his license. As a result his skills in mountain racing were honed, and is able to drive under adverse weather conditions.

In aditions of history, this manga, and specially the anime becomes very popular in Japan and outside, the reason for the suceess of the serie was the real animation base up on real cars, with the real names, equipment and spec's, original engine sounds, style, features, capabilites and maniobrality ifself on cars, and the use of real driving techniques like leeft foot braking, use on rally competitions and the pride of automovil culture on japan the drifting techniques for the touge roads.

The roads are based on the real touge pass from the mount Haruna, in the series appears under the name "Akina", located at the gunma, eastern Honshu, Japan. The location are exactly like in the anime and are use for the local drifters.

The use of massive JDM cars in the anime show us the greatest cars from Japan like the nissan Skyline gt-r, Mazda rx-7, Mazda miata, Suzuky cappuccino, Subaru impreza, Mitsubishi lancer evolution, Honda civic type r, Honda s2000, Nissan silvia for mentioned a few, but the most popular of that cars was the litlee but powerful toyota corolla sprinter trueno GT-APEX, with the mitic 4A-GEU engine under the hood of the chassis called AE86 for Toyota designation codes, previusly used on Japan for rally races, gt-races, even drag, but its specially used for drifting and the most important Keiichi Tsuchiya has his own achi-roku means "86" on japanese.

Its so popular the AE86, because after 23 years was produced the price for one of this are between 1,000 Us dollars - 5,000 Us dollars in normal conditions with a few bolt-on mods, and they are still used on road races, rally, time attack, and drifting of course.

The anime its very popular too in the world of arcade games, in Ocaido, Japan, on one of the Sega Arcade's saloons had a full cars simulator using a complete corolla, rx-7 and impreza, and front of the cars are 90 inch monitor for living the initial d experience.

The anime its divide in fourth stages, and three special editions, the manga its still publicated, and the team its working on his fifth stage, they have a movie too, call lived action from those anime series becomes to the big screen, Initial D was released on June 23, 2005 in several Asian markets including Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China, where it topped the box office in its first week, was available in the US, in some America regions and European markets.

The funny about the movie its the character are chinesse people not japanese people, the film development in the same places at the anime, the movie take please in Moun Haruna in Japan, uses some of the cars like the Nissan Skyline gt-r R32, the Lancer evolution's, the mazda's rx-7 the FC and FD generations, the Silvia S13 and the corolla, so please enjoy the anime and the movie are really good, and make you dreaming a lot.

And but the way, anyone want a Initial D pic like this, Takumi and his corolla, event the master Tsuchiya had one, me tooo, its a miata but is white, just for funn.

The rally history of NISSAN

Sorry if we list Datsun cars under the Nissan name. But it always was one and the same car manufacturer, so we did not want to split them in two. Datsun is the oldest Japanese car maker, founded in 1914 and existing i.e. more than 20 years before Toyota. The company was originally founded by 3 people: Kenjiro Den, Rokuro Aoyama & Meitaro Takeuchi. Take the first letters of these gentlemen's surnames and add the Japanese flag symbol, the red "sun" and out comes Datsun. However it appeared here we have a car manufacturer financially struggling throughout its existence. In the mid 1930s, when most other Japanese car manufacturers were founded, Datsun fell under full ownership of Nissan. Nissan itself is an abbreviation for Nippon Sangyo, a company that produced automotive equipment and electronics and is also mother to Hitachi. When in 1983 Datsun was renamed to Nissan, this was solely a change of marketing name, Datsun was Nissan owned since 50 years! The reason for this move was again financial problems, followed by an attempt to change brand image. It didn't help much, in 1999 Nissan fell under Renault ownership.

In rallying Nissan/Datsun is the first Japanese make to come out with a true in house rally program (in 1969). And they are distinctively different to their Japanese opposition as not only was Nissan/Datsun first, they were run out of Japan and they didn’t need persuading by a European rally driver to take on rallying. If you look into the rally history of i.e. Toyota, Mitsubishi and Mazda, you find that Nissan really is the exception in Japanese attitude, at least in this respect.

Maybe at this time there was split personality within the Japanese works team Nismo (= Nissan Motorsport). Reflecting on the Silvia 240RS, Nissan surprised the whole rally world for being the first manufacturer to show a full house groupS rally car, the 300ZX based mid-engined 4-wheel-drive 4-wheel-steering MID4. However when groupS was cancelled and groupA came, the heavy RWD Silvia 200SX could once again only have been with African adventure rallies in mind.
Nissan’s attitude only turned away from Safari specials to full scale WRC in the early 1990s. The dead born groupS car aside, their first and in fact only car clearly designed to win the whole championship was the groupA 4x4 turbo Sunny GTI-R, launched in 1991. Interestingly only then Nissan’s operation turned away from Japan to a business based at Didcot, GB and run by former star navigator Dave Whittock and conveniently named NME (= Nissan Motorsport Europe). This project however was hugely embarrassing. Not only was reliability a major issue, but for its performance and being group A a big problem of the road car version of the Sunny GTI-R became very apparent: for some reason the intercooler was placed above the engine and exhaust manifold, the hottest place in the engine bay, such it acted more as an interwarmer. This meant performance was a problem and because of groupA the engineers were not allowed to move the intercooler. A funny side effect of this was that to improve the under bonnet air circulation Nissan was running on all events even at full daylight always with the full light pod fitted.

But as you can read the nissan rally experience wasen't to bad, because gives us a sr20det road version for the owners of niisan Pulsar gti-r, nissan b13, u13, plataforms and of course the rwd version on nissan silvias s13, s14, and s15, the awd technologies call ATTESA for nissan, the NISMO division and all his weapon from the nissan march s-tune version (call nissan micra here in México) to the ultimate nissan gt-r nismo version, so rally for nissan in some way was no complete understand on that years, in others meanings is not a completed fail, is more like grow up, and be ready for the future, I hope personally nissan returns a full WRC program under the new spec for the incoming years.

Here its a very nice example whats is NISMO for a nissan fanatic, and the WRC legacy, enjoy it!

http://www.vimeo.com/3009316

Race to heaven.....

The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb (PPIHC), also known as the The Race to the Clouds, is an annual automobile and motorcycle hillclimb to the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado, a distance of 19.99 km (12.42 miles) over 156 turns, climbing 1,439 meters (4,721 ft) from the start at Mile 7 on Pikes Peak Highway at 2,862 meters (9,390 ft) on grades averaging 7% over both gravel and paved section

The race is on the FIA International Events Calendar and has featured competition from United States rally sanctioning body SCCA ProRally in 2004 and Rally America in 2005. It has taken place since 1916 and is currently contested by a variety of classes of Cars, Trucks, Motorcycles and Quads. There are often numerous new classes tried and discarded year-to-year.

This races was and exceptional on all entire USA, because the americans never had the WRC drivers on his own ground, but a new area on the rally universe began with the newest FIA (Federation Internationale de'l Automobile) rules on the 80's for the mitic B rally group.

So, in that years Audi introced the Audi Quattro S1 in the hands of beauty Michele Mouton, that was the firstime woman to wins the race on 1985, a year before the FIA banned the B rally group for his dangerous and fatalities on Europe.

After the FIA B rally group were cancelled, Pikes Peak was the place for brands like Peugoet, Porshe, Audi, Toyota, and the races to heaven still in this days, but now its Suzuki the rival to beat , on one of the most exciting course around the earth.

But the title for the most faster driver is for Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima from Japan who clocked a time of 10:01.408 on July 21st 2007 driving the 1000 hp mid-engined Suzuki XL7 Hill Climb Special, breaking the previous record (set in 1994 by Rod Millen) by less than three seconds. The winning time in 1916 was 20:55.40, set by Rea Lentz.

91 years later, and 10 minutes with 54 seconds less, amazing.

D1 GRAND PRIX SHOWROOM MEXICO

OK, this event was cancelled severy times, so that was good for me and my litte (bastard) cousin, that gives us more time to be prompt, and usually the trip from the beutyful city of reynosa (yeah right) to de imponent and huge Monterrey city was around 2.5 hours in powerful ford expedition 1998 with leather seats and confortable 6 places...6 no 8 places people!!...so the trip was a little tight.

Well after all, we arrived to the monterrey speedway, the day was rare, first hours wiht light rainy, but the event starts, the heat star to kill us at 35 degrees, thanks god I have my kitty umbrella...yeiiii.

For my was the firstime a see a professional drifters, and more important all, I see a nissan silvia S15 the original no the classic s14 with front end conversion to be a s15, nou mrs that was for real S15 direct from New Zeland, between RX-8, RX-7 FS/FD, MIATA, S13, S14, and the american muscle ford mustang, dodge charger, and a fews ae86.