Wouldn’t it have been great if I had actually been in the Okayama Prefecture in Japan, taking all these photos and covering stuff like this for you guys? Haha…some day I’ll make it to Japan and believe me, the coverage will be absolutely amazing. For now, we will just have to play a game of “make believe” and pretend that I was at the Nakayama Circuit covering one of Tactical Art and friends’ track days. It was cold and I probably didn’t get enough sleep the night before for whatever reason, maybe because I was following these guys around….In reality, I really do have coverage of this event though, and it comes courtesy of the guys from Tactical Art. Hopefully this isn’t your first day here on The Chronicles and you’ve become well-acquainted with who and what Tactical Art is. It’s pretty early so I’m not going to try and explain it to you guys so if you would like to find out more, simply search this site or go on Google and type in the search terms “Tactical Art Japan Chronicles” and I guarantee you will find something….

Anyways, this actually took place back in late November, but Mr. Yasutaka Shimomukai wasn’t able to get the photos over to me until just last week. With the new year and consistent business over at Tactical Art, it’s been difficult to keep the lines of communication open. Out of the blue, he emailed me to just to say what’s up and sent me a giant chunk of photos that he had collected from the past two months. I think it’s great that we have been able to keep the lines of communication open because we are both fans of one another and now I have a way of bringing you some pretty cool stuff that’s going on over there that no one else in the U.S. can. What I mean by that is that you may see cool automotive content from Japan, but often times it’s the bigger, more well-known events. The Tactical Art guys tend to do their own thing and attend smaller track events whenever there is one going on so they help to bring us a completely new perspective of the Japanese Honda community. I like their enthusiasm and you can really tell that they want to learn more about how we do things here in America. I mean, the feeling is mutual of course, because we are all very excited to see what is going on in Japan…

This track event that they attended took place at the Nakayama Circuit. It’s a track that isn’t too far away from them and as it turns out, Nakayama Circuit is actually very well-known. It was built in 1970 and was one of the four original racetracks to be approved by the JAF (Japan Automotive Federation) for competition. The other three are tracks that you are probably more familiar with; Suzuka Circuit, Fuji Speedway, and Tsukuba Circuit. If you have played any motorsports-related video games like Forza or Gran Turismo, than you will definitely be familiar with those names. Unlike the three more well-known tracks though, the Nakayama Circuit has aged a lot over time and actually lost it’s JAF approval around 1989. You can tell in the later photos that the track has some age. It’s just used for smaller, private track events now and that’s why you will only see a small grouping of vehicles in the photos. I have to thank 7Tune for providing me with the info on Nakayama Circuit, otherwise I’d just be making up a bunch of bullshit and telling you how speedboats and unicorns race here for gold, or some shit, haha…

Before we begin, I don’t have any actual race footage because it was not provided to me. Maybe they didn’t get a chance to upload them yet, or maybe they just don’t have them. From the photos, I saw that they did have cameras and camera mounts on the cage of some of their cars but again, I didn’t receive anything. If for whatever reason you feel like your day isn’t complete because you didn’t get to see videos of them racing around the track, uhh, I don’t know, how about you just learn to move on and make a sandwich or something. We are lucky enough to have these photos today so we can’t really complain or ask for more. I think it was really nice of them to pack all these photos together in their original formats and upload them to a file-sharing site for me to download. The file was almost 500MB and there were two files, so you can already imagine how long it took for me to download these. After I got them, I went through and picked out what I felt were the best ones too and processed them and sized them correctly to meet the format of this site. They aren’t photographers nor do they claim to be, so I had to discard a lot of the blurry images and what not. They got more than enough photos though and I think they came out pretty good. I don’t know if they took these photos strictly for their own personal blog, because they only use a couple of the images, or if they took them just for me to post up here. From the amount that I got, I can only guess that they intended for me to use them and for that, I have to give them a huge thank you. I love seeing stuff from other parts of the world, especially from Japan, so it is not even a chore for me to get these up for you guys today. Alright, enough with the long intros, let’s get to the photos…

Inside the Tactical Art facility, where they were prepping for the day’s adventure at Nakayama Circuit…

Atuki Tubouti, owner of Tactical Art, making final preparations on his EG6…

A quick look at the rest of the facility…Not too big in size but more than enough room to store their cars and do audio installs, which is what they normally do on a day-to-day basis…

Yasutaka Shimomukai’s EG Civic with the ride height adjusted for track-use…You can see in the background that Atuki’s EG is being loaded onto a trailer…

A look at the outside of the shop…Once the car was loaded-up, Yasutaka hopped into his EG and they headed down to the Nakayama Circuit…

Love the aggressive Volk TE37s on this white Civic…

Atuki-san making adjustments to the suspension…

You can see in the background how the walls and buildings how the age of this track…

The interior and fiberglass dashboard of Atuki’s EG…

One of their buddies brought out his EG for the day as well…

Not much done to this Civic…it has some aftermarket fenders that have been pushed out even further to clear the meaty tires and low offset XXR wheels…

His Civic is bare bones with nothing other than a solo, old racing bucket with Takata harnesses on it…

Atuki’s Civic ready for action…

…as was Yasutaka’s EG…

All the competitors standing in line to get the rules and paperwork for the event…

Another one of their friends helping out and making sure everything is secure…

Tire change on an EJ1 coupe…

Another pair of EG-chassis Civics sitting across from them in the paddock area…

This EG has some pretty aggressive aero and I always see it in photos with them at track days…

Note the mirrors, hood, clear corners, and the fender work required to get those meaty ass TE37s under there…

Schedule for the day…

A look under the hood of the Defunkt Racing Civic reveals massive ducting driving air into the ITBs…

Check out the aggressive front fender treatment necessary to house those 225/45-16 Advan A050 tires and 16×9 SSR SP3 Professors…

Rear shot of Yasutaka’s EG, bumper holes and all…

His interior…

Another glance at Atuki’s interior, notice the cut out doors?…

Check out this wild Integra that was there…The rear fender work is nuts, especially with the gas tank lid and everything being reshaped. The front fenders have been widened and cut towards the bottom, almost resembling a Japanese Super GT type of look…This thing is wild…Looks like it has a non-staggered set of 17×9 TE37SLs too…Plenty of tire and traction all the way around…

An AE86 Corolla Levin coupe with SSR MK2s…

Another EG….check out the orange Recaro seats, might be something that Rywire Ryan might want to look into for his ITR build…

Interesting rear bumper treatment on this EF hatchback…I can’t help it, but everytime I see the graphics on the side of this car, it reminds me of Bruce from Family Guy…

Haha…I’m sure even you casual Family guy fans will understand what I’m saying. The moment you read what the car said you were probably already thinking it…

Center-exit exhaust… Spy the Integra in the back heading out to the track from the paddock area…really wish they would have gotten some photos of that thing out there…

The name of this vehicle escapes me right now...Ohh Nooo….Honda Today 2-door perhaps?…

Stock-body Nissan S15 Silvia with WEDSports…

FD2 Civic Type R on Advan RS…

Yasutaka chucking the deuce…

Peep his canard set-up…

Dialed and ready to go…

Hanging out while they wait their turn…

Shimomukai grabbing some vending machine coffee while waiting…They don’t give us that many options in the U.S. because we as a society are indecisive and would take forever to decide on what we wanted. And judging by how U.S. vending machines work, half the time you would never get your drink anyway because the fucking thing would break…If you’re wondering, 150yen is just under $2.00 U.S…

The FD2 R heading out…

One more shot of Atuki’s EG6 before it heads out for a beating…

I personally liked this shot a lot…

Yasutaka in his EG6…seeing that giant “Tactical Art” decal splashed on the side of his car reminds me that I have to send a batch of Chronicles stickers out to them….He said he wanted to run my site’s URL on the side of his car but my machine can’t cut anything nearly that huge…awesome idea though, haha…that’d be crazy to see…

Lining up in the staging area…

Only “track footage” that was usable…I’ll have to ask them if they got an on-board video…

A couple shots of them returning to the paddock area after they were finished with their session…

That’s pretty much it… I hope you guys enjoyed it. It’s always cool to see something different and to see how other countries do it. Thanks for looking and thanks to the guys from Tactical Art for providing us coverage of their adventures…