I should preface this story with a warning that whatever you’re reading is based on my own memories and my own research. They say that “everything on the internet stays forever” but that is certainly not the case for so much of the early 2000s car content. A lot of it is missing now, websites have disappeared, assets from servers are gone, and we are left with whatever we can find, which is scarce. Especially when you consider how much Japanese car content wasn’t on the internet back then so it’s even harder to dig-up information now…

As the title states, this is a look at Top Fuel in Matsuzaka, Mie, Japan in 2022. If anyone has visited them recently and done a story about them, I don’t know about it. It’s actually quite hard to find information on Top Fuel because the term “Top Fuel” is terrible for SEO. Like, you search it and all kinds of shit comes up, just nothing about Top Fuel, the tuning shop in Japan. For the younger viewers, this shop is iconic. Top Fuel shaped so many of my generation’s ideas on what a Honda should look like and how it should be built. It defined an ideal for us. I don’t think anyone has gone there lately to do much of a deep dive on their shop, considering the pandemic and all, but had they, it wouldn’t matter to me. This is my story on Top Fuel, what it looks like now, and how its history was the foundation for my love of Hondas. I don’t think I would be a Honda enthusiast today had it not been for Top Fuel. And had I not been a Honda guy, there would definitely not be “The Chronicles”…

This issue of Turbo magazine featuring the Top Fuel EK9 on the cover was actually one of the first tuning magazines I ever purchased. I actually remember it still like it was yesterday. I don’t know why it was such a strong memory but it just stuck with me. During high school, I would look at my friend’s magazines during class and that was when I first started getting into modified cars. There were students that had lowered cars and some siblings of classmates I knew that had more “fixed-up” cars but we only really saw the really intricate builds then in magazines. It was around May of 1999 when I was in a supermarket with my mom getting groceries and I would often stop by the magazine rack to glance at what car-related stuff was newly on display. I had a subscription to Motor Trend back then but hadn’t really started to collect import publications yet. This June issue of Turbo was the first magazine in my collection. That photo above was shot just earlier today while I was typing this out…

Yes, I have held onto this issue of Turbo magazine for 23 years…

It was my first introduction to Top Fuel. I don’t know what it was. It could have been the livery, the giant A’PEXi intercooler and Buddy Club front, or the Advan RG wheels. Maybe the combination of the three. That and the car was just slammed to the ground. It just had so much presence. It “made me feel some type of way” as you’d say these days. I loved this car at first sight, lol. The Advan RG wheel is one of my all-time favorites because of the Top Fuel EK9. I’ve owned two sets in two different decades because I always knew I’d own these wheels when I was a kid…

This build would still be relevant to this day though this car is long gone. Even the photographer who shot this feature, the one and only Shaun Carlson, has since passed on. All that exists from this imagery now is this magazine and the plot of land where Top Fuel is in Mie. It took me 23 years to finally step foot onto their property, to finally see Top Fuel with my own eyes. I guess the main reason why it took me so long to finally go there was because I didn’t think there was anything left to see there. It seemed like they had moved on from the Top Fuel I knew as a kid. Our mutual interests had changed…

The above image from their now defunct website of the 2000s was everything I knew as Top Fuel Japan. That Top Fuel, is long gone, I thought. I didn’t want to be disappointed when I went there, I guess you can say…

It wasn’t until recently when I found out that Top Fuel had heard of me…

Yasu was chatting with me a few months ago and he randomly mentioned that Top Fuel was requesting some Battlecraft shift knobs. I was like, “What? How do they know about Battlecraft?” and Yasu told me that he had been in communication with them since he does business with them and Top Fuel had discovered Battlecraft through watching the Vlogs on my YouTube channel. I didn’t believe it. Of course we were out of knobs at the time so I told Yasu to let them know that I would get some knobs to them when we restocked. When I decided to head back to Japan, Yasu asked me if I wanted to go to Top Fuel to visit their shop and I was all for it. Obviously I didn’t think too much about it or have any expectations of what I’d see there, but it was still cool to go there—just to be there. It’s such an iconic place that I feel like every Honda enthusiasts who visits Japan should try to go step foot there.

What wasn’t lost on me was that they had shifted their focus over the years to different vehicles. No longer were they dedicating all their time to building ’90s Hondas. That makes sense. After all, you gotta grow with the industry so in the past decade, their focus has been on cars like the Honda S660, Suzuki Swift, and the underachieving Honda CR-Z platform. The last major build that I and many of my peers were interested was the incredible Top Fuel S2000RR. That car kept them on the radar for many of the enthusiasts outside of Japan. But even that car had sold not too long ago and was thought to be gone. It bummed me out but I understood that they had developed that S2000 to its maximum limits. It was time for them to move on. Had my schedule been filled to the brim and I had no time to squeeze in a visit to Top Fuel, I thought I would have been okay with it. I didn’t have to go because I was just expecting to see Suzuki Swifts and S660s. But as fate would have it, I had a day planned for Mie. Yasu wanted to go to Voltex anyway so we made a day of it…

My visit to Top Fuel turned out to be my favorite part of this year’s trip. Boy was I wrong to expect absolutely nothing there. Let me rephrase that, because it might have made it that much better that I didn’t have any expectations. It helped blow my mind, haha…

The drive was roughly two-hours from Osaka to Matsuzaka, Mie. When Yasu and I first pulled-up, it looked…familiar. Neither of us had ever been before but I had seen so much of their facility over the years in photos that I immediately recognized it. Not much has changed over the years. Even the building itself showed its age and the signature color scheme had degraded in its vibrancy. I guess it was appropriate that we came on a day when it was overcast so the gloom could help add to the ambiance…

What surprised me was seeing the fleet of cars parked outside. I was expecting nothing but newer, modern, demo cars but there were some older Top Fuel builds that looked very familiar…

Perhaps the biggest surprise was a glance inside their workshop where I spotted the famed Top Fuel S2000RR. Like you I thought it had sold through auction but it was just sitting there in plain sight. This S2000 is a car I’d come to see annually during Tokyo Auto Salon and Osaka Auto Messe trips but after finding out it was supposedly gone, it was like seeing a ghost…

I knew I didn’t have too much time there to see everything in full detail so I immediately looked around to get a general idea of the layout was like. I glance over to a corner where there was a dyno room used for tuning. Inside was a blue (Mazda) Eunos Cosmo, probably a customer car, set-up for the floor-mounted rollers…

But anyways, back to the S2000RR. From the looks of it, the time attack democar was completely unchanged. I asked Yasu if they could find out why it was there but all they said was that the car was back. There was apparently a payment issue with the buyer so the car ended-up not being sold after all. At least that is what it sounded like anyway. I’m not privy to that information nor is it any of my business so I didn’t ask any further questions…

Whatever the case may be, it seemed fitting that the S2000RR was there. As if after all this time, things fell into place where this car would end-up being at the place I had taken so long to finally visit…

They had dedicated so much time and work into evolving this S2000 to this current iteration. Over ten years in fact, based on the available assets I could find. Top Fuel had been tinkering with this car for so long that people just got used to seeing it. I know I did. Even at Top Fuel I spent more time looking through everything else I found there that I didn’t spend much time with the S2000RR…

Perhaps I took for granted that I was seeing an 1000+horsepower S2000 that is still one of the fastest Hondas in all of Japan. I was being spoiled…

I just knew I had to see other things that I never had access to before…

For those of you unfamiliar, Top Fuel has always been synonymous with drag racing. Most of their notable builds were actually drag cars. Their Honda builds were multifaceted however, with some devoted to time attack, some to drag racing, and others strictly for style. They actually deal a lot with car audio as well, even in 2022 so they are a true pro shop that covers it all…

One of the first builds that I went over to study was this JZA80 Supra drag car. It looked like it had been out of commission for some time and likely just left there as a parts car or perhaps retired from service…

The 3-spoke Try-Force Zelda wheels looked familiar on this Supra. I then recalled seeing it in an old Super Street magazine article back in 2003. After some Googling, I even found the remains of the digitized feature on the Motor Trend site. It’s one of the few articles that (sort of) survived the multiple server transitions after Super Street was sold multiple times…

It really bums me out that so much of the digitized articles are gone now or missing assets. Eventually all of it will be gone, trust me. But that’s a conversation for another time…

Here is the only surviving image from that feature so we can get an idea of what the Supra looked like in its prime. The article, coincidentally also published in June, states that this A80 belonged to a customer of Top Fuel who was actually a police officer…

It featured a fully-built 3.0-liter 2JZ-GTE with made 889PS/674TQ and ran a 10.81-second 400-meter time on street tires.

The exterior of the 1993 Supra still looked very much intact, minus the Bomex front bumper. It either got destroyed or was sitting in storage somewhere I imagine. The Top Secret sideskirts remain, as does the Trial rear half bumper….

Not sure when this Top Fuel graphic was heavily-utilized, maybe years before the blocky black/white/red logo came to fruition. Perhaps it was designed specifically for the drag cars, I am not sure. I was more surprised that the chrome had vinyl had not withered and was still very mirror-like…

The decals on the side of the door also remain in decent condition, noting that the Supra utilized a GReddy T88H 38GK turbocharger, Quantum dampers, and a Holinger 6-speed transmission…

I always like to look at cars that have either been abandoned or left decommissioned. It tells a story of a different era when they’re left unchanged over the years. I appreciate the markings and the decals on the car that represent a specific time period in the past, like this Top Fuel “PENGIN FAMILY” decal. Not sure what it is for, or what it designates, but the design is so uniquely ’90s-early 2000s…

Here is another example with an older Top Fuel logo design…

I looked through the rear hatch glass to see what I could find and spotted two Bosch Type-B fuel pumps, custom fuel lines with dual Top Fuel “Power Neo” magnets attached, a Cusco rear strut tower bar, a single Recaro seat, and a NOS bottle mounted to the floor. Seeing all this leads me to believe that they didn’t retire this car for parts, since most of it was still intact. Maybe the customer just lost interest, stopped messing with it, and didn’t want to sell it because of its sentimental value…

A signature metal “Top Fuel” badge still affixed firmly to the rear hatch. Above it is a glimpse at the ABFlug Type 1 rear wing…

I did some further digging around on the Internet and found that the last time this Supra made a major public appearance for Top Fuel was at the 2006 “Exciting Car Showdown” which took place, also coincidentally, at Port Messe in Nagoya—the same venue where Wekfest Japan has been hosted…

They actually took a photo of every single car that was participating in this event and posted it on the Option magazine website. In this screen grab alone you can probably recognize a bulk of those cars including the Top Fuel DC5, Top Fuel EG6, the Supra of course, and the early stages of the Top Fuel S2000RR.  Even the Esprit NSX and Wacky Mate Supra are on there…

Again, I don’t know what happened to the Supra over the years but it appears as though it just resides at Top Fuel in their collection of retired demo cars…

Right next to that Supra was another JZA80, this one silver running a Top Secret front bumper and headlight covers. It had Top Fuel decals on it but nothing very large. Perhaps this was also a customer car. I couldn’t find any information on it even after scouring through their blog posts and old photos, so I can’t tell you too much about it. The hood and headlight covers have deteriorated quite a bit so I believe it has been sitting for a lengthy amount of time…

The 17-inch Volk Racing TE37 wheels had spiderwebs wrapped around most of the spokes and the signature bronze finish had all but faded from the elements…

After looking through some of their old blog posts, it seems like these Supras have been outside for years. They move them around because they have small gatherings here but they are likely just pushed in and out but left outside…

Wedged in-between the older Top Fuel builds was a modern Honda S660 built by Top Fuel. They’ve focused a lot of their time into developing this platform since the S660 came out in 2015. They’re actually quite popular in Japan so it can be assumed that much of their revenue these days comes from this and the Suzuki Swift, which is also very sought-after there….

I really like how dedicated they are to this graphical style, even to the point where they made a graphic that wraps perfectly on to the vented hood of their S660…

While I was shooting video and photos, Yasu calls me over to tell me that one of their employees wanted to show me the other side of Top Fuel. His Civic was parked over there and he wanted us to see it, but all I could hear was that there was another side of Top Fuel…

The employee, Motokazu, owns and built a Civic that I was already familiar with from seeing the car often on Twitter. I had no idea he worked at Top Fuel and has been there for a couple years now. What was more surprising was that he lived in an apartment right behind Top Fuel. He told us that Top Fuel actually provides housing for its employees since their facility is out in the countryside of Mie…

You have to be there to see what I mean by “countryside” because there is literally nothing around but a few small shops and mostly rice fields…

It was cool to see his Civic in-person finally but it was what I saw on the way to his car which blew my mind. Just knowing that there was more to Top Fuel was already exciting because I was stoked to see the Supras and the S2000RR. Did that mean that there were more old Top Fuel builds lurking…

So I started walking around the building and in the corner of my eye, I came upon this…

I had to do a double-take because I couldn’t believe I was staring at the one and only Top Fuel CR-X! My jaw-dropped. How, after all these years, could this car possibly still be here, just parked outside?!…

Sadly, I can no longer find images of what it looked like when it had its original Top Fuel livery on it. This was when it was competing in Malaysia back in 2005. This might be the last known photo of it online and it only exists because it was uploaded to a Facebook page in 2017…

Like the JZA80 Supra, the CR-X also looks mostly unchanged. As if they parked it one day thinking they’d go back to it some day, but that day never came. They just never needed the car again. And it just stayed there, left to the harsh summers and winters year after year. Nature began to take over, as did time itself. In some ways it was frozen in time but in other ways, quite the opposite…

I looked across the street and inside a display window was the original Top Fuel hood, complete with the gold decal on the corner of the hood…

Here is one of two images I found of the CR-X in its prime. This one shows the hood that was in the display window above on the CR-X. Here you can also see the wide front drag slick mounted. I believe this photo was captured at the 2003 Fukuoka Auto Salon event…

It’s kind of an amazing sight to see the Top Fuel CR-X in 2022, retired next to a building that also is as weathered as the car itself. The signs above are deteriorating but still very visible representing Yokohama, Blitz, and Trust…

The front wheel on it now is an old SSR Type-V, likely mounted on it only for ease of transporting it from wherever it was until its current resting place. The front splitter looks like it was made of wood that has been reclaimed by nature, moss growing on it after water erosion took over and destroyed sections of it….

I wonder if the car was just left here after it came back from Malaysia. The CR-X toured all over in its prime years, including Southern California in 1999. It ran consistent 10-second quarter-mile times back then with just a internally-stock B18C Integra Type R engine…

The fiberglass front-end detached slightly, still resting on the Mugen sideskirts for support. A part of me wanted to see if I could get the hood open to see what it looked like under but seeing as how it had been sitting and slowly falling apart, I was worried I’d further damage it…

Here’s the rear set-up with a custom aluminum rear wing and rear diffuser, along with a modified Mugen rear bumper. The drag skinnies are still mounted but tires deflated and flat-spotted…

I wanted to get a closer look at the Top Fuel hood that was inside the display window and saw this EG6 hiding behind one of their tow trailers. This build where the Civic was parked was a completely separate building located across the street behind the main Top Fuel facility. It looked like it was used mostly for storage. I wondered what else could be stored in there, likely some gems I hoped, but I didn’t want to intrude…

So I focused on this Top Fuel EG6 which I had never seen before. The only EG6 that I was familiar with was a build they used for Tokyo Auto Salon on white Advan RGs. The same one you’ll recognize from the collection of cars in that 2006 Exciting Car Showdown image. This one looked more like a race car…

Yasu took a look at it and said he remembered seeing it compete in some endurance races back in the day. But the only thing he really remembered about it was that it was turbocharged…

The hood was a completely one-off hood with cut-outs along the top to let heat-out, there’s a functional center vent and a smaller vent on the intake side to feed air into the engine bay…

Thankfully, there was actually some more images of this Civic than the CR-X. The current Top Fuel website even provides some information on the car…

The first image I found of this Top Fuel EG6 was this cropped image that was uploaded to a polish image-sharing site. The user who uploaded it was banned for reasons unknown to me but this photo survived. It was uploaded in 2016 which confused me, because there was no way that this Civic was still active six years ago…

So I combed the entire Top Fuel site and blog for information. Like, literally 100s of pages and this is what I found…

Yasu’s memory was spot-on. This Honda Civic SiR was indeed an endurance race car, built to compete in the “Enjoy 7 Hours Endurance Race” at Twin Ring Motegi back in the 2000s. The entry on the website looks like it was made in 2011 so the car likely hasn’t been active since then, being that everything said about it was in the past-tense…

As you can see, the outer appearance of the EG6 has remained mostly unchanged since the 2000s, where it competed for 7 years and finished the endurance competition every time. The “VTEC SPORTS” decals have been removed from the car most likely because it was likely one of the sponsors or hosts of the race series. “VTEC SPORTS” is/was a popular Honda-based magazine publication…

The exterior only featured alterations to the front bumper and hood. The interior was gutted for weight-savings with only a single Recaro seat inside. The powerplant itself was a turbocharged B16A which made a healthy 390HP. The fact that it competed and finished every year shows how reliable their turbo set-ups were…

But alas, the endurance race series ended around that time and the Civic retired soon after…

This image right here might be one of my favorites from this set. It represents everything I loved about Top Fuel and why it got me into Hondas. The iconic Top Fuel logos, the Advan RG wheel, and the Civic chassis, though not the EK9 was my starting point in my fascination with this shop…

Eventually I made my way back to the front because Yasu was getting hungry and wanted to grab lunch before we went to Voltex. So I walked around and tried to shoot as much as I could of what I missed when I was distracted by the CR-X and EG6 in the back…

This S15 Silvia was another one of their demo cars which they used specifically for drag racing. You can tell by the ride height, the rear flare which provided extra space for a wider slick and the number designations on the windows. It wears full M Sports aero but no rear spoiler since it wasn’t necessary for drag racing…

Though I don’t have much information on this car either, from what I gathered, this might be the most recently active build of theirs that I’ve shown you guys, other than the S2000RR of course. From the blog entries, it looks like they were still doing work to it up until 2014…

Here is a photo of it from their blog in 2011 when it was loaded onto a trailer before an event. The Supra drag car below it is the Supra I remember the most from their fleet because of the green graphic. It was a departure from what they typically did but it made the Supra stand-out so much more. I don’t know what happened to this build however. It might have been sold or wrecked, which is usually the fate of most of these demo cars….

And this was the most recent photo of the Silvia in 2014 when they installed this side-exit exhaust which you can still see in the photo I took of it…

All their drag cars had similar graphics schemes which made it a very obvious observation that the S15 was another drag car in their line-up…

This S2000 is actually very interesting despite how it sports very little graphics on the body, none on the glass anywhere, wearing just a full Amuse GT1 kit. At first, I thought this was just a customer’s car but after sifting through their old blog entries, my assumptions were incorrect. This is actually an old demo car of theirs and was built around the same time as the S2000RR. From photos and texts, this was 1 of 3 S2000 demo cars they built during that period. The first being the S2000RR, the second this Amuse GT1 AP1, and the third was a J’s Racing Type-GT widebody S2000. I don’t know what happened to the J’s Racing one, which was painted gray, as it wasn’t on the lot anywhere. I don’t know what they used this S2000 for. Most likely it was used as a display/show vehicle…

Here is a photo of it literally parked in the same spot next to an earlier version of the S2000RR back in 2011. Not much has changed in over a decade as you can see, other than the carbon fiber hood being oxidized from the weather…

This SW20 I am not very familiar with, nor could I find anything online about it. It might just be a customer’s car. I peeked inside the engine bay and saw that it didn’t even have a motor. Top Fuel did have a SW20 MR-2 Turbo demo car at once point but it looked very different than this one…

After staring at the MR-2 for a while, I walked back over to the S2000RR to get more photos since I realized I was completely neglecting what might be Top Fuel’s best overall build ever. And who knows if I would ever see it again after this?…

If you’re wondering why I didn’t get any video of photos of the cars inside the workshop area, that all comes down to respect for the owners since those are customer cars. I didn’t want to potentially show anything that customers who weren’t there weren’t aware of. That EK Civic in front of the S2000 was pretty sick though. It had a full Advan livery, a complete Mugen aero kit and a turbocharged B-series…

Such a beautiful car this is, using a complete aero kit designed by Voltex Suzuka, who we would visit right after this….

Wherever this ends up, I hope the owner/shop appreciates it and doesn’t change anything. It’s perfect just the way it is. Ideally, we’d all want Top Fuel to keep it forever but they probably sold it because they could use the money for their business. And we’re not talking small money either. This S2000 sold in the six-figures…

One of the most inquiries I received after posting the Vlog episode about my visit here to Top Fuel was about this BB4 Honda Prelude. There isn’t much information on this build unfortunately, but oddly enough, it is also one of the more recently-active cars that they worked on, with a blog entry dating back to 2014 when they did a 5-lug conversion to it. As you can see, nature and time has not been kind to this Prelude. It sits here in this back lot likely as an abandoned project. There were two Preludes on site that day, but this one was likely the one they had since the early 2000s…

There is an image on the old Top Fuel website which no longer exists where this Prelude was used as their banner image. So at one point, they were probably pretty high on this chassis. I was only able to find it using the Way Back Machine and pulling up whatever non-broken assets I could uncover since that website is long gone since like 2002…

I couldn’t find anything on this Celica whatsoever. I just stood there staring at it because it was the first time I’ve ever seen this chassis Celica with a Varis aero kit on it. The lines are insane. Like the Prelude, it was also left to deteriorate outside. Despite how abandoned it looked, the car still appeared very complete…

The decal on the front fender represents a bolt-on turbo kit that they had been developing for the naturally-aspirated 3S-FE engine. Unfortunately, nothing turns-up on the internet though I do remember the “Chikara” name under their product line….

I originally thought this was a GT-Four Celica but the lack of the OEM Toyota vented hood and no rear wing likely means it wasn’t an AWD turbo model. Hench the need for a demo car to showcase their turbo kit….

As you can see on the side of this Celica, it also had the same graphic as the Supra. There’s no information that provides any timeline for when this car was being built it was probably around the same period…

Even deeper into the back lot was a blue EG6 Civic SiR, complete with the rare silver moldings. It looked like this had been involved in wreck or was just used for parts…

At one point this was likely a demo car, judging by the graphical layout and the wheels. I wish I knew what happened to it and why it just sits on jack stands while nature consumes it…

I guess I should mention that there was an R33 Skyline GT-R on the lift as well but it was also a customer car in for maintenance. Just imagine you take your car in for service here and they just casually put it next to the Top Fuel S2000RR…

I don’t know too much about Suzuki Swifts but I do know that they are insanely popular in Japan. Top Fuel produces a lot of products for this platform and they actually have a couple of Swift Sports builds in their fleet. This particular one is a 1.9L HKS GTS7040 Supercharged circuit race car…

Here are a couple of extra photos of the Top Fuel CR-X that I captured while shoot video B-roll. I just couldn’t pass on the opportunity to get more photos of this car…

I really don’t know what condition it will be in if I ever find my way back to Mie…

If you’ve made it this far, you’re either crazy like me, enjoy reading more than you know, or love Top Fuel just as much as I do. Either way, I appreciate you, lol…

Even if nobody reads this, I don’t think I’ll mind too much. It was just much fun and almost cathartic to put together…

This was truly bucket list stuff for me, just to see some of these cars even in this condition. I love urban exploring but would never want to actually explore derelict buildings and locations. Unearthing derelict tuning shop cars is probably the next closest thing to that which will satisfy me. What an amazing visit this was and something I won’t soon forget…

I hope you guys enjoyed seeing and reading about all this as much as I did putting this together. This might have taken almost ten hours of my time on a weekend, maybe more. It’s nearly 4 am now and I’m still at the office.

On that note, thank you all for reading about my fascination with Top Fuel Japan. If you haven’t already watched the Vlog episode, please do! I’ve attached it below!

Thanks for looking and huge thank you to Top Fuel for allowing me to walk around and shoot all this stuff. I honestly still can’t believe I saw what I saw there…

If you want yourself enjoying this post or this type of content, and you know someone else who would also enjoy it, please share!! Thanks!!…