Rumors float through the offices of Super Street on an hourly basis. Usually, they go in one ear, we get on the Internet, log onto the Club Si chat room, and recycle the rumor mill like it was going out of style.
All kidding aside (actually, we are usually the last to know about anything juicy or gossip-worthy), nothing grabs our attention more than the words "top-speed testing" and "New Zealand." That usually means all the biggest import tuners in Japan are involved.
The sparsely-populated back roads of Rotorua in New Zealand bear witness to some of the fastest speeds ever clocked in a road car. This is where the real Japanese thrill-seekers go instead of Disneyland, where the only costumes you find are flame-retardant.
At the beginning of the year I heard, through the grapevine, that the Option video crew was on location in Rotorua filming the latest top speed sessions. That's when I lunged for the phone and punched the digits for JUN Auto Mechanic. At the first sign of a click I blurted out some semblance of a question, asking if JUN was testing anything in New Zealand.
"No, no, no," the man from JUN said emphatically. "We don't have a car there at all."
"Are you sure?" I pressed on, my only strategy founded on the desperate belief that if I held him on the phone long enough he just might reveal his hand. "I heard that you have an Impreza there or something."
This might have gone on for a while. I don't quite remember. But I do remember how it ended. It was a single sharp, gruff syllable, like a bark.
"No."And that was all that was said. Of course, it didn't surprise me at all a month later when Fly dropped off photos of a top speed testing session in New Zealand. When JUN said "no" it was understood that it was a no as far as I was concerned. Reality wasn't the issue. And we both knew it.
Such is the nature of the business. It is made up of technology and secrets, and both go hand in hand, because the former would not exist without the latter. But that's another discussion altogether. Now back to the cars.
To some degree what JUN said was correct. They didn't have a car there at all. They had a super car. But the Impreza turbo that JUN brought wasn't the showstopper. At first blush, that title belonged to the Top Secret Supra. With Option's Daijiro Inada behind the wheel of the Toyota screamer, the car reached 190 mph at 8,000 rpm in Fourth. The car is geared for over 200 mph in Sixth, but the turbo took too long to spool and the car reached the end of the 6km stretch before coming close to the record of 216 mph.
Sharing the marquee with JUN and Top Secret was Veilside, which brought its R34 Skyline GT-R V-spec along to play. Inada hit the first kilometer in just over 10.5 seconds. Heartbeats later, the car would finish at a colossal 214 mph, faster than anything in the Super Street garage. But it was still 2 mph short of the record mark, which means it's back to the drawing board for the tuners.