Tag Archive for ‘mintia civic’

Late night car meet in Osaka before heading to Kyoto to hang with Kei Miura!!…

Late night car meet in Osaka before heading to Kyoto to hang with Kei Miura!!…

During Auto Messe weekend, we always try to host a gathering somewhere in Osaka because there are so many people in town for the show. It just makes sense to bring everyone together for some post-show activities. That way it maximizes the experience for those who come to the Kansai region and it allows them to get a taste of true Osaka car culture. It’s not unlike Tokyo, when the masses all link up at various night meets in the city. This is just on a smaller scale but with a completely different vibe. If you enjoy cars, you already know that Osaka will be thriving that weekend. On this particular evening, we decided to bring our newly-finished Mintia “Cold Smash” EK4 Civic race car out. We had friends in town who hadn’t seen the car in-person yet and even though it is a dedicated race car, we thought it’d be fun to see this thing smashing around the city. A few days after that, we all headed over to Kyoto for a fun evening with Kei Miura from TRA Kyoto. You may know him as the man behind the popular aero parts company(s) Rocket Bunny and Pandem. We all grab dinner and then head back to his shop where he shows us some of his latest projects and goes through the unique process in how each build came together….

Designing a real Civic race car in Osaka for Exceed and No Good Racing…

Designing a real Civic race car in Osaka for Exceed and No Good Racing…

A couple months ago, Yasu acquired an old EK4 Civic race car that had spent much of its life competing in the Suzuka Clubman one-make race series. The car physically was still in pretty good shape but you can tell that it had been raced a lot. It just had a lot of wear and tear, you know? He wanted to do more circuit racing and time attack events this year using this newly-acquired EK4 so he asked me to design a livery for it. I don’t know why he thinks I’m capable of it because I’ve actually never done a full livery on a real car before but I figured I’d give it a shot. He owns a body shop so if it came out terrible, we could just tear it apart and redo it. My friends had always talked about doing a “Mintia” livery because it’s our favorite Japanese mint and has long been an inside joke. I think most of our friends and acquaintances know about Mintia because we’d always share them with everyone. Der even has a credit card with a custom Mintia skin. So I studied the packaging and went into full detail trying to come-up with a way to use the EK4 as its own Mintia case. Around late October last year, I came up with a pretty rough version of it. Over the course of the last few months, I refined it as Yasu started to transform the car in real-life. He painted the Civic a custom blue hue that matches the Mintia packaging and the graphics started to take shape once I arrived back in Japan last month. Now you all can see it come to fruition…