March Intel - Super Street Magazine

LA Auto Show
Celebrating its 100th anniversary, the LA Auto Show finally put on, well, a show. Normally later than an ovulating female packing holey jimmys, the organizers pushed the dates earlier in the season to ring in their centennial celebration. In accordance to their fortuitous timing, a record 36 World and North American debuts were made at the Los Angeles Convention Center-among them some stunners from Acura, Honda, Mazda and Nissan.

Acura revealed their Advanced Sedan Concept-a batmobile-like supercar, while older-brother Honda showed off the REMIX-a fun, sporty coupe-and the STEP BUS-a shrunken down Element-like vehicle sporting dual sliding mini-van doors. Mazda unveiled their desert landscape inspired Nagare concept and Nissan introduced both their new Altima coupe and Sentra SE-R. Although the much ballyhooed GT-R didn't make its debut, the LA Auto Show shook the industry like a magic eightball. Outlook good.

Now if we can only get someone at Nissan to get us on the GT-R press drive list.www.laautoshow.com

Breaking News: HKS Breaks off Tsukuba
TsukubA Dooby Do
53.99 seconds is not a lot of time, but it was all the time JDM superfly hot shoe Nobuteru 'NOB' Taniguchi needed to hustle the HKS CT230R Lan Evo VIII around Japan's hallowed Tsukuba circuit, the holy land of time attack. You may or may not remember this HKS Time Attacker from our August '04 cover. At that time, the Evo's glorious carbon fiber body was raw and nekkid as opposed to the blood red that currently coats its flanks. And it answered to the name of TRB-02 or Tsukuba Record Breaker Version 2.0. The original name of this Evo was fitting because the car broke the Tsukuba tuner car time attack with a 54.739. The previous 55.8 record was held by the OG HKS TRB car, the Track Attack Altezza (featured on our April '01 cover)

What does all this mean, other than the fact that HKS likes to beat itself (we like to beat ourselves too, but we're not setting any records)? HKS has always been keen to prove the worth of its products on the motorsports stage, and a time attack record is a fitting way to accomplish this task.

In typical HKS fashion, the tuner was not content with merely holding the Tsukuba record, it wanted the overall tuner car record at all of the major J-spec circuits. The most fitting stage for this task was at the Hiper Challenge meets, a series of track events produced by HKS for their dealers and customers. To our knowledge, all of these HKS Evo times are for tuner car circuit records. HKS might even drop the CT230R on a certain road course in Buttonwillow, California in an attempt to own that Time Attack record as well.