The LEE Collection at the Bend Motorsport Park

It’s a funny thing old social media and I had it come full circle on me recently. I have been seeing all these amazing cars pop up in Perth recently, finally when a new model Ford GT arrived I did some further digging. Turns out a lot of these cars belong to one man, a gentleman by the name of Laurence Escalante. Anyway a short Instagram stalk later and I was soon following @theleecollectionperth (that is the Lance East Exotics Collection in case you are wondering). Anyway I had been bugging my mates saying ‘follow this guy’ and ‘did you see that latest story’ when I noticed they were at the Bend Motorsport Park….

All Japan Day 2021

With the way the world is at the moment (I am trying to avoid the dreaded C word – you know what I mean) I just want to thank everyone involved in hosting All Japan Day (AJD). It is not hard to imagine that the 2021 version could have been cancelled, a victim of the C… but it wasn’t! So let’s give thanks to the volunteers who gave up their time and come with me for a day out featuring some of the best Japanese cars Adelaide and surrounds has to offer.

280TypeMR – The Rarest of the Rare GTS-T

This started in my mind as a simple Instagram post but has now snowballed into a full blown blog post about the 280TypeMR, one of the rarest, if not rarest R33 GTS-T models available. I was cruising through some Japanese car sale sites and this immediately caught my eye when I saw the title… Okay, so no doubt you are aware of the 400R – This is essentially the GTS-T equivalent, known as the 280TypeMR!

R34 GT-R History 101

Do you ever wonder what your car would say if it could tell you about its history? I have always wondered but thanks to typical Japanese record keeping I have some idea of my cars history. Let’s time travel to 1999 and work our way back from there!

Track Day – The Bend Motorsport Park

It was a very early morning wake up call as my alarm started blaring at 4.45am – of course I was up immediately as I was heading to The Bend Motorsport Park. I have been there before but this time was a first for me, I was entered to complete laps in my own car!

Rs Meeting 2020… Kind of!

2020 Has been something else, among everything else going on I want to take a break for 5 minutes and focus on Rs Meeting. Another event that had to radically change for 2020, it was essentially a closed event with no spectators and only 400 cars being eligible for the traditional photo shoot. Obviously travelling to Japan was out of the question for me as well. So with that in mind let’s go on a virtual trip to Fuji Speedway…

Daikoku PA

As far as Japanese car bucket lists go, it would be a safe bet that Daikoku Parking Area (PA) would feature quite highly. It certainly did for me and late on a Sunday afternoon it was time to tick it off the list!

Sportscar Sunday – Sept 2020

I don’t want to drone on about 2020 so let’s take a minute or two to have a break! Sportscar Sunday (SCS)is an event I have been looking forward to for months, so it was exciting to get out of bed early on a Sunday morning, head along, look at and talk cars! The fact many car events have been cancelled recently just added to the excitement.

Victims of their own success?

These are some observations of mine regarding the R34 GT-R but in reality these apply to the R32 and R33 models as well. To be honest they also apply to a lot of the hero cars from the 90s/00s JDM era – think Supras, RX7s, etc. What brought this up was a quick look at carsales.com.au – there were no 34 GT-Rs for sale across Australia on the site, something I have never seen before… So why is that?

Cars & Coffee Blackwood – July

Cars and Coffee Blackwood returned in these strange times to a rapturous applause – well in a car kind of way! The weather was as good as one could expect for July… but that didn’t dampen the enthusiasm.