I absolutely love doing this type of stuff…Normally I would be providing you guys coverage from the latest event that I went to but with the Year.Three meet coming up, I just haven’t had much time to go out and shoot. Which reminds me, if you guys are here to see coverage from the last Formula D event, I apologize because I didn’t have a chance to make it out there. Another reason I decided not to go was because May was participating in the Long Beach Marathon and it was important that I be there to support her. I don’t do much marathon running because I tend to only run when something is chasing me, but May is really into it so I have to support her…
Anyways, when I say…”I absolutely love doing this type of stuff”, I mean I love going to other sites/blogs from different parts of the world to see what is going on in the automotive community outside of the one I am accustomed to being in. I particularly love going to sites in Japan because as long as I’ve been a car guy, I have always looked to Japan for inspiration. Anytime I can see something new and learn more about it, Honda/car-wise, I’m all for it. The Hellaflush Japan 2011 event really sparked my interest because of certain cars I saw there. I mean, I enjoyed the cars at the event so much that I went and asked someone in Japan if I could use his photos just so I could show you guys, you know? I noticed somebody mentioned one day that I must have been tired or whatever because some of the cars he saw me post up were “straight-up JDM rice” or something to that degree. And I think that reader missed the point. For the most part, I did post up builds that I really liked but I also just posted cars that I felt were interesting enough for you guys to see. Some of the tastes in mods may not be to everyone’s liking, including mine, but I really wanted to show you guys what their interpretation of our scene is, especially when it comes to Hondas. Some of those guys take that whole “hellaflush” thing way too far over there, just like the people here, and I wanted to show you guys that…
With that said, one of the Hondas that really did stand out to me was a Honda that I didn’t even see in anyone else’s coverage before I stumbled upon it on the DOHCresearch website. DOHCresearch has long been one of my favorite automotive websites EVER. I would go as far as to say that DOHCresearch was one of the sites that really opened my eyes to Hondas back in the late 90s to early 2000s. The cars that they had on there were, to me, absolutely stunning. I know there are many enthusiasts today who will also say proudly that they looked to DOHCresearch for inspiration, and that site was based on some Hondas from Hawaii. The site itself slowed down quite a bit the last couple years and updates weren’t as prevalent as they were in the early 2000s so I found it interesting that they had coverage of the Hellaflush event in Japan. Sometimes I’ll hop on that site just for nostalgic reasons and to stare at old Honda builds so I was pretty surprised to see they had photos from the event. Now the Honda that I was referring to, that I hadn’t seen on anyone else’s coverage was this EG6…
Photo courtesy of DOHCresearch.com of course…I think with all the hype of it being a “Hellaflush” event based solely on everything stance-related, this Civic track car was overlooked…
This is a photo, also courtesy of DOHCresearch.com, that I posted up on The Chronicles Facebook page the other night…
I tried to find more photos of it online but there just wasn’t much other than the photos above. I decided that I wasn’t satisfied with just those two photos so I used my journalistic detective skills to try to find more. I spent much of the night before trying to dig for more photos of this car but they were just few and far between. The only thing I really had on it was that it was a build from “Tactical Art”. I hopped on Yahoo! Japan and I was finally able to pull up Tactical Art’s website and blog. On a side note, I realized later on that all I really had to do was look at my own site stats because the guys from Tactical Art actually caught wind of my coverage online and they had already linked it on their blog. Crazy how the internet works these days…
The following photos are photos from Tactical Art’s blog….
I couldn’t really read through all the translations because most of it just didn’t make sense, but this is what I gathered from going through their entire web diary…
It turns out that Tactical Art is actually a shop in Japan that deals mainly with audio installations. From the photos, they do other stuff like parts installs and what not but their main foray is doing custom audio set-ups for high-end vehicles like Lambos, Benzs, etc….
From what I saw, their custom audio enclosures and entire automotive set-ups is very impressive. The Civic that you see at the top of this post, is one of the workers or owners at Tactical Art….You can see in the photo above how the Civic looked before it’s recent transformation to it’s current look from the Hellaflush Japan event….
Here’s a much older photo of it…
Shot of it here, also an older photo, at the starting grid at a track event…
The aggressive white wheels in the front are actually a 16×9 +13 pair of SSR SP3-Rs… I don’t know too much else about the car because the guys who take care of their blog tend to provide more photos of cars that belong to customers and that show off their audio work…
One interesting thing to point out however, is the custom FRP dashboard that they made…
Kinda hard to see it but in this photo, you can kind of make out the dashboard here….They kept the original color to almost make it unnoticeable that the dashboard is a custom made piece…photo again provided by DOHCresearch…
Another Civic that caught my eye at the Hellaflush Japan event was this EK4…
People have been saying that it looks just like ATS*VEE’s Civic and it is nowhere near the same car. I liken it more to Ryan Der’s EK but whatever…I totally overlooked the fact that it had a “Tactical Art” banner on its windshield and it turns out that Tactical Art was the shop that (re)built this EK…When I was looking for photos of the EG above, I started seeing photos of this Civic pop up on their blog…
There were a couple of photos of this Civic floating around on the web, but leave it to DOHCresearch.com once again for actually walking to the other side of the car and taking a rear shot of it so we can see what’s going on inside…
Here’s a shot of the interior of the EK4…Everybody was taking photos of just the front of the car and you couldn’t even tell that the inside was battleship grey…
Once I started going through the Tactical Art blog, I was hooked…It didn’t have THAT many photos but there was enough photos on there to show the process in which this Civic was put together. I called it a “rebuild” earlier because that’s exactly what it was…a rebuild…
This is what that Civic looked like before it was redone and repainted…It already had the cage and all but the Air Walker (style) front bumper was removed and he had some Shift Sports fenders added in place of his modified stock front fenders. The Work Meister S1s are the same as well. I saw Speedhunters’ story on Hellaflush Japan and they mentioned that they were Work S1Rs but they are actually just the old Work S1s that were redone in all black. I read on there that it was a staggered set-up too with the fronts being 17s and the rears being 16-inch…
With the fenders installed before paint…wheels still original finish…
The interior before the re-spray to grey…
…and after….
Through the translations, I could sort of make out what the owner’s goal was for this EK4….They said that he wanted a full street car that he could also take to the track. That’s why the car still retains all of it’s creature comforts like the OEM JDM climate control, power steering, etc… You can see in the upper left corner that there is a little indicator denoting that the car is equipped with an alarm system. Since Tactical Art is a audio/electronics install shop, they make it a point to always show their alarm installs in their blog. In the build-up photos of both this car and the EG, they have posts showing the installs….I guess they’re worried about getting jacked too…haha…
The wheels after they were refinished in black with original Work Wheels decals reapplied…I remember when I had my S1s polished I had to remember to apply the decal right where the valve stem was as well…
A late night shot of the car after they reassembled it after paint and with the wheels re-installed…
Here’s a shot of the car on the expressway…
This shot of the EK4 was at one of their local track events, from some of the other photos, it looks to be at the Suzuka Circuit….You can see here that there’s nothing really special about the engine bay. It’s still white in fact…
On the owner’s blog, which I also somehow managed to find, is a video of the car during a shakedown run before he ran the car at Suzuka… Hopefully the video displays here, if not click HERE….
Pretty cool…
Okay, so while I was trying to find more info on the car, I stumbled onto this other blog site which of course, I later realized was already linked back to me in my site stats. This blog belonged to a tire/wheel/alignment shop in Japan called “Craft” and was operated by the owner of the EK4 who works there. Originally when I was going through the Tactical Art site, I assumed that both Civics belonged to people that were from that shop but that wasn’t the case. The guy that owns the EK4 worked at Craft and was just a customer over at Tactical Art….
Here’s a photo of it posted up at Craft. I thought I was glued to the screen while looking at Tactical Art’s blog but when I started going through all the photos and info on the Craft blog, man, I was on that shit for hours…
Their whole thing was that they took photos of basically every car that they worked on. That sounds sort of boring but when you see the type of cars that roll through there, damn, it looks like a pretty cool spot to work at…They had a lot of VIP cars, Kei cars, Hondas, Nissans, everything…I’m telling you, I was on this site for HOURS….
Here’s some of the cars that they were working on. There’s a ton more but I include the link at the end of this post….
Here’s a Nissan Stagea on SSR Professor SP3s….
Here’s a shot of an alignment they were doing on a Toyota Crown with Leon Hardiritt Ordens…
Different car, same wheels, this one with a Mode Parfume kit and custom rear fender flares…
Honda S2000 with a Spoon front bumper, ASM fenders, and rear flares on Wedsport SA55M….
Liked this white Toyota Aristo that they posted up…
I don’t want to go too far off topic but yeah, they work on all kinds of cars at the shop…
Gonna close it out today with some track photos that I collected from both the Tactical Art and Craft blogs…
The brown EK4 in action…
White EG that’s totally unrelated to both the Civics I was speaking of…
An EG and an EK…I’m just throwing these in here because I figured you guys would enjoy them…
The Tactical Art EG…
I don’t know whose EK this is and the photo is pretty old, but I like the Manaray wheels on it…
That’s pretty much it…. If you really want to see more and be stuck on the computer for hours and hours staring at car photos, click the links below. It’s all in Japanese so it will be hard to understand and navigate through their sites so be forewarned…
…and of course special thanks to DOHCresearch for showing me the Tactical Art Civic in the first place…
Hope you guys enjoyed it, thanks for looking….
Year.Three is a little over a week away!!!
Love the EK!! I like how it can be showy, yet do business at the track!!
Nice, just a quick correction – the S2000 above is running ADVAN RZ wheels. The SA-55M are machined in between the spokes. Love you blog, can’t wait for year.three coverage.
haha i didn’t mean it really to be a dick, my bad. i just read it like you were diggin that ugly ass db8 with the bmw front, which from reading the blog so long i know isn;t your style…bad ass post here. amazing rides…good luck to may at the marathon!
Very nice post!! Really enjoyed this one!
Hello there… May I knw where is the shop? N need the address please? Thanks