I’ll wrap up this year’s coverage of 86 Day with this pit walk video from Fuji Speedway. It starts off in the parking lot and then winds through all of the vendors that were present. It seems the Toyota GT-86 / Scion FR-S / Subaru BRZ has already been well embraced by the Japanese aftermarket tuners. There’s a couple of N2 cars from Crystal Body Yokohama and Tec-Arts and D1 FT-86’s from Up Garage and HKS.
In Japan they like to celebrate days devoted to some of their favorite classic cars based on their chassis codes. August 6th (8/6) is AE86 day. The AE86 is a Japanese cult classic because it sticks to a simple formula of lightweight, rear wheel drive and a rev happy engine. It’s the spiritual successor of the Toyota GT-86 / Scion FR-S / Subaru BRZ. The AE86 champions the saying “It’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.” It’s a completely bare driving experience in that the car does exactly what the driver tells without any quirks. This has allowed allowed the AE86 to be adapted to several forms of racing including a freshmen racer’s cup, Group A, N2, rally and drifting. Here are some of my favorite videos of the AE86 in action.
This first video is from the Hot Version division of the Best Motoring company. It’s from a celebration thrown at the Tsukuba Circuit in honor of Drift King Keiichi Tsuchiya’s retirement as a driver in the Japan Grand Touring Championship (JGTC). I like this video because it explains Tsuchiya’s racing history with the AE86 as well as the N2 racing series by Toyota Racing Development (TRD). N2 was the highest form of racing for the AE86. The car is still popular enough in Japan that TRD resurrected the N2 series and got Tsuchiya-san to drive the factory race car.
This is another vintage YouTube gem of a video. It’s a late 90’s documentary that follows Toyota Team Europe (TTE) as they build the AE101 based Toyota Corolla WRC to replace the ST205 Celica GT-Four. You get a great inside look at a world R&D process from component testing to wind tunnels and finally having the drivers put the car through its paces in different environments. The narration is in Japanese, but all of the interviews with the TTE staff are in English.
What?!? Two incredible Scion FR-S/Subaru BRZ/Toyota GT-86 reviews in two days? Now that the car is starting to see some production numbers and the big names have already finished with the press fleet, some of the independent car reviewers are getting their hands on them. This is good news for us since these guys tend to spend more time and passion reviewing the cars. As a follow up to yesterday’s FR-S vs. BRZ track comparison by Everyday Driver, Nino Karotta takes a GT-86 across Europe. He visits some of the best roads in Europe to see what it takes to drive the GT-86 fast and to drift it. He also compares the GT-86 on track with his personal AE86, the car’s spiritual successor. Nino brings a dial caliper with him on his trek across Europe to keep track of how much tire tread he’s burning off the rear wheels.
These guys actually get what makes the Scion FR-S/Subaru BRZ/Toyota GT-86 special. Just about every other review of the cars are too vague. Yes, the car handles well and is balanced, but it goes beyond that. The way the car handles, thanks to the low center of gravity of the boxer engine, could almost be described as fundamentally different from all other FR cars with pistons that move vertically. I’m going to describe it in much more detail in my review of my friend’s BRZ that should go live later this week, but for now listen to what these guys are saying about how the cars handle. They notice a lot of the unique sensations that everybody else missed in their reviews. It’s also the best run down of how the different suspension tuning philosophies for the Scion and Subaru translate on track that I’ve seen so far.