2009 Rotary Tuning Fair At SuperAutobacs Sunshine Wharf, Kobe City

SuperAutobacs atSunshine Wharf in Kobe regularly holds mini car shows which coincide with campaigns run by the store like a Recaro fair or a Honda Type R fair. For the last four years the Rotary Tuning Fair has been a fixture on SAB Sunshine Wharf’s calendar and this year it’s still going strong… kind of.

The number of cars at the Rotary Tuning Fair is slowly dwindling it seems, I was a little surprised to see barely 25 cars lined up in front of the trade stands. The anchor trader was RE Amemiya and even they disappointed a few people by not bringing their Genki 7 which was plastered all over the print advertisements for the show. Isami Amemiya was there briefly to oversee his trade stand but disappeared before I could get a chance to say hello but he did show up in the background of one of the photos. The RE Amemiya cars that were there were all finished nicely and the white FD3S RX-7 looked like it was a last minute entry to make up for the absence of the Genki 7. Still a nice car but not what we wanted to see.

Other traders like R Magic, Auto Exe and Nakamura Racing Factory all had one or two cars on display with the R Magic Pink Rokugou being the highlight of them all. Being the most completely modified car and with the brightest day glow pink wheels you’re ever likely to see sure made it stand out among the other RX-7s and RX-8s. That leads me to another thing that struck me while there. You really could feel that the venerable FD3S RX-7 was showing its age among all the RX-8s present. The FD3S is still king of the rotary sports cars but for the first time I felt like this reign might finally come to an end with some of the larger Japanese rotary tuners concentrating more on the RX-8 now. It was never apparent at the circuit because the RX-8 as a race car was the exception rather than the rule but at the Rotary Tuning Fair at least, it definitely seemed like the FD3S as a well supported street car was moving into retirement mode. That’s not to say we won’t see it on the track anymore, far from it, but it was obvious that the FD3S is starting to show some wrinkles.

There was a fairly good turn out of RX-8s just to the side of the Rotary Tuning Fair and there were some very nicely modified examples of both SE3P and FD3Ss mixed in with some stock and mildly modified cars. There were a few more cars here than there were in the actual Tuning Fair so it was nice to be able to spend a little more time seeing the different ways people went about modifying their Mazdas. There weren’t all rotary powered Mazdas there though, a couple of Roadsters (MX-5/Mitata) there as well as a few Mazda Demios, one of which from Nakamura Racing Factory had a turbo installation and another from Auto Exe had paddle shifters added to the steering wheel! I didn’t realize the Demio would be supported this well by major Mazda tuners like Auto Exe so it was good to see some non-rotary powered cars getting some attention too.

That was all to it really and it’s not a big show at all but, as with most of the mini car shows at Sunshine Wharf, one which is definitely worth checking out if you have a spare hour or two.

Words/Images: Justin Karow

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