Last month Michael made a brief mention of his catalogues arriving from zeppan.jp; now it’s my turn 
seeing as this would be the last time I’d ever get a chance to order a batch of items from Takeshi, I decided to splash out… exchange rate be damned!
car kitsch for Africa!
as evidenced by the photo above, 11 items in total arrived, covering a range of vehicles from the ’80s right through to the late ’90s. But since this is retro-classics after all, we’ll only concern ourselves with what matters!
The important stuff - '80s turbos.
First up is the venerable R31 Skyline GTS coupe. The “brand new” 6-cylinder NICS RB20DET was serious business, but interestingly enough didn’t make as much power as the 4-pot FJ20ET it was meant to replace.
R31 Skyline coupe
engine choices - RB20DET, RB20DE, and the yuck RB20E.
whatever you might say about Mitsubishi and their morbid fascination with blue smoke, they still managed to knock out some impressive numbers from their ’80s turbo engines. 160PS from the intercooled G62B was big news in 1982; it shared top billing as the most powerful domestic production engine with the Toyota 3T-GTE and Mazda’s 12A turbo… until the latter broke the stalemate in 1983, when the revised version came out with 165PS. but that’s a story for another day.
A175A Lancer EX turbo catalogue.
model choices - note the GSL turbo version sans intercooler.
Intercooled G62B.
Now a couple of sweet hot hatch Toyotas. The obscure 3E-TE powered EL31 Corolla II was covered in a previous ’80s turbo talk entry on this here blog, but its little sib the 2E-TE EP71 Starlet needs no further introduction, being quite popular on a global scale.
EL31 Corolla II GP-turbo
3E-TE turbo engine guff.
TURBO S!
2E-TE turbo engine guff.
finally, a very obscure Japanese Ford. Telstars may have been common as dirt once upon a time in NZ, but not so in the land of the rising sun. Based on the Mazda Capella, the TX5 Ghia turbo was made in extremely limited numbers and utilized one of Mazda’s least common 4-cylinder turbo engines (the FET “Magnum EGI”). Pity they never sold them here.
New Telstar - 1985!
styley LCD dash. Note the in-your-face turbo light.
the rare TX5 Ghia turbo.
and that’s a wrap. It’s a shame that Takeshi is officially closing his site as of the end of this month, but no doubt I’ll eventually acquire more catalogues off Yahoo and various other sites which will merit a mention of their own.
Picture fail.
please elaborate?
I did find one thumbnail which linked to the wrong photo, but that’s been fixed now.