![]() Nisei Showoff is all about cool cars rocking the most fashion forward colors. This is Chunks! He is such a die hard AE86 guy that he even got the old school Toyota katakana logo tattooed onto his forearm! Speaking of mail, here’s a USPS employee and AE86 owner that I met when he was working at Longo Toyota. Who would ship out their random gold stuff in the mail anyway? Crazy, but I wonder how hard it would be to get wide barrels for these wheels? Also, I must watch too much late night TV, cause these wheels keep making me think of that Cash4Gold commercial. I’m talking about those fully gold dipped Work VSXX faces. Not too far away, I spotted another dropped Civic with some eye catching sex appeal. ![]() But I just wish the wheels were wider that would be even sicker. I think this custom finish on the Volk Racing CE28Ns looked pretty awesome, especially with the color matched lugnuts and everything. Full Toda valvetrain and cams maybe? This engine must shake, because it has some beefy looking polished Hasport engine mounts too. Peeking out from underneath the purple valve cover are anodized bronze Toda Racing camgears, which leads me to believe that this engine might be packing some punch. I was impressed that the tips of the velocity stacks on this Civic’s B-series engine (how can you tell the difference between B16 and B18s anyway? I can never tell.?) were anodized purple to match the valve cover and wheels. I don’t know the owner of the car, but I was told that this Honda Civic is actually from the Bay Area. One thing that most cars back then didn’t have were individual throttle bodies. In fact, I liked these wheels so much when I first saw them, that I bought a set for my very first car, a super slow (but cool looking at the time) 1986 Toyota Celica coupe, which had 16×7 Sprint Hart CPRs and a 5Zigen Border 3 dual exhaust back in 1996. It makes me think of old school Group A racing in Japan. The wheels caught my eye immediately… I absolutely love the classic Japanese, sporty design of the CP-Rs. Southern Cali based crew As1 had a clean right hand drive DA Integra at Nisei Showoff, rocking Sprint Hart CPR wheels. It has a lot of history, even though many people probably don’t realize it.Įven back in the day, DA Integras were the car to have. This is one of the reasons why I think the Nisei Showoff is so important to the scene. ![]() Back in the day, we used to see crews like Black Magic from SGV (all black cars with different types of SSRs SSR Superfins, Supermesh, Neos, Work Emotion, Gale Racing, Bang Vecs), Shoreline Racing (old school Toyota guys from Gardena/Torrance area), NRG from Cerritos, Split Second from Carson area, Redline Racing from the San Fernando Valley, and a whole lot of others.”įor me, hearing stories about the early days of the import scene in Southern California is so interesting, especially when Ken Miyoshi is telling the stories, which are usually filled with some cool info that only an insider could know. People from the carnival used to chill out on the curb, and wait for all the fixed up cars to cruise through Little Tokyo. “Back then, all the JA (Japanese-American) guys with dope cars used to go to OCBC (Orange County Buddhist Church) during their Hanamatsuri (Flower Festival) and cruise with their friends,” Ken continues, “This was also happening in Little Tokyo there always used to be a carnival in the original Nisei Showoff parking lot location (2nd Street and San Pedro) and a parade as well. As Showoff founder Ken Miyoshi explains it, “the people that organized the Nisei Week festivities in Downtown LA’s Little Tokyo wanted to bring enthusiasm from younger people back into the Nisei Week Festival, so I decided to work with them by throwing the first Nisei Showoff.” Although Import Showoff was founded way back in 1994, with the first event held in March of 1995, the first actual Nisei Showoff didn’t take place until 2000. We have a few new contributors coming on board, so the next few months will be very exciting! It has been a very long and busy week for those of us working on the Motor Mavens project! We’re an extremely small staff, but we’ve been keeping ourselves real busy with back to back meetings and photo shoots! We have also spent quite a bit of time this week on planning out the next stages of development for the website.
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