HKS: ACCESS GRANTED

Everybody’s been asking me since I’ve gotten back—“How was Japan, man?” Well, the general response was either, “Cold,” “Frickin’ cold,” or “Really frickin’ cold”. Yes, there was the yearly pilgrimage to the Super Autobacs store (a little over-hyped, if you ask me) and the blatant scoping out of Japanese girls, something Maurice told us to look out for at the train stations. The Tokyo Auto Salon was obviously cool and something you can read about elsewhere in this issue, if you haven’t already. But the highlight of this trip was going deep inside HKS. And you can forget about having to sneak past security; we were in baby!

This plan was actually the brainchild of Super Street and HKS USA as part of a tour package we offered to the Tokyo Auto Salon. You pay the price; you go to Japan. You go to Japan; you also go to the HKS factory. HKS itself is located at the base of Mount Fuji in the city of Fujinomiya, a small town that is sprinkled with small local businesses and not much more. There are actually two facilities in this region, the main (HKS Co., Ltd.) and the Fujinomiya Plant. At the main plant, the suspension, manufacturing, experimental, and new experimental labs are located on these grounds. Here, you can witness raw materials run through a series of process until it becomes the final product. At the Fujinomiya location, all the exhausts are assembled via an assembly line and packaged for sale. Both of these places sure put the Super Street offices to shame (Yeah, but can they wear shorts everyday like I can?—MD).

Once we arrived, it was obvious where we were. The employee’s parking lot was filled with highly-modified Japanese supercars: Skyline GTRs, FD RX-7s, and a few Silvias. One of those cars are probably worth more than 10 LJ Garcia cars put together; street value. The inside was incredible. Kind of like being in that dream where you have your pants down in front of your classmates, except you didn’t want to wake up from this one. After a warm, welcoming meeting with Mr. Hasegawa (the H in HKS) and Mr. Kitagawa (the K), we were finally turned loose in our version of a McDonald’s playland. I don’t think there was a single room where someone wasn’t caught trying to use their five-finger discount. We even found bins and containers outside of pillow ball mounts and mufflers that were considered “trash”. And while we failed to grab a few T04R turbines as souvenirs, HKS was gracious enough to provide us with an HKS sports bag, T-shirt, and jacket instead. You could say we made out pretty nicely.

By Super Street Staff

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