These are the posts I love the most, allowing readers to get a more down-to-earth look into companies and personalities. Away from the limelight it is always so refreshing to see just how normal people are and the guys at T&E were a great bunch to spend the best part of a day with. I dropped by their main shop in Yokohama to try to get a behind
You can never have too many sexy station wagons. Here's another one for our monthly BMW theme - an E61 5-Series from Japan sitting nicely on a set of 20" BBS LM's. BMW may have a sizable SUV presence, but I've always respected the company for keeping the station wagon tradition alive. -Mike Garrett
The tuned E92 M3 you see here is a very special car. It is one of the latest creations Tanabe-san of Powerhouse Amuse had the time to complete before his passing around this time last year. Tanabe-san was always a believer of combining power with lightness, with such projects as his S2000 time attack cars, the Carbon-R R34 GT-R not to mention the Z33
Here is one car with tons of tuning potential. I spotted this particular 335i up in Hakone when I was shooting the Check Shop M5 . It had just been put through its paces by a Japanese magazine and looked particularly attractive with its lowered stance and AC Schnitzer kit. Thanks to some ECU tuning the sequentially turbocharged straight-six was developing
Here's another 1JZ-powered E36, this one built by several years ago by Impact Magic in Osaka, Japan. It's not as extreme as some of the builds out there today, but I remember being blown away when I saw this car in Option Magazine back then. With a twin turbo inline six, I guess you can consider it a homebuilt predecessor to the current 335i
With all this talk of historic BMW race cars and crazy drift machines, it shouldn't be forgotten that BMW's also make damn good luxo-barges - especially in 7-series form. The newer 7's are OK, but to me there's something great about the simple and classy lines of the E38 model. This Japan-based 740 is doing it right with proper VIP wheels
One of the most prominent features of Japan and its people is the ability to modify outside things to make them their own. This applies to cultural elements as well as automobiles. We've seen examples of this on everything from hot rods and kustoms to Rauh Welt Porches, and I figured I'd kick off my BMW features with a gallery of BMW's from
What do you do when you need to get your drift car from one Japanese island to another? You load it on a ferry of course. Here we see Takahiro Ueno's BMW 3-series being loaded onto a ship for the journey to its competition debut at D1GP round two this weekend at Autopolis. Takahiro Ueno Official Blog -Mike Garrett
Despite not being quite ready for competition yet, I thought you guys might like to take a little look at Ueno's ¥30 million D1-GP BMW project. Last month I dropped by the SUI•VAX workshop to take a few shots of the 3-series, which as you can see looked very much completed, aesthetically speaking. The project was based on a 320i, which
It looks like veteran D1GP driver and Vertex shacho Takahiro Ueno will be saying goodbye to his iconic red Soarer following the end of the 2008 D1 season. According to a press release from Vertex USA, Ueno will be retiring his beloved Soarer and switching to an all new BMW 335i coupe which will be powered by none other than a Toyota 2JZGTE engine. The