Toyota Motor Sports Festival Part III

Rounding out the Toyota Motor Sports Festival of 2009, I’ve just picked out a few more photos that I thought summed up the event nicely.

Picking up from the specially reserved car club parking area, we arrived back on the main straight just as the ‘tour buses’ were about to leave. Not your ordinary tour bus ride of the surrounding lakes and wineries but rather more like a wildlife park bus ride where GT cars and other beasts stalk their prey on corners and straights.

The pack, about read to to be set loose…

The pride of the pack, the ENEOS #6 car of Daisuke Ito and Bjorn Wirdheim about to slingshot past one of the tour buses. The noise as the cars all took off together reverberating off the stands was incredible, so you can just imagine just what it must have been like to have them zoom past you just inches away!

Here, the LFA lies in wait to join the rest of the pack.

The LFA looks right at home out in the wild back parts of Fuji, quickly approaching the next corner with Mt Fuji standing proudly behind. While the the car is a serious engineering marvel, the race versions were both surprisingly much more restrained and quieter than the SuperGT cars with a more refined, smooth accent coming out of the 4.8L V10.

With the big boys being rounded up and sent back to their pen, playtime toying with the buses was over.

Back inside the garages the array of goodies to look at just kept impressing. In one corner was this NASCAR‘Camry‘ Like the Corolla we posted in the first post, there seems to be little resemblance to the road going version and this colorful Camry also happened to pack a 5.8l pushrod punch to the guts.

Sitting pretty in the next pit was this clean AS Yanagimoto AE86. It had been fully stripped down and redone from the bottom up. Just check out those smooth billet trumpets on that 3S-GE! Some one should remove that ‘lemon’ sticker though… It looks like tasty pie to me!

In the afternoon, the pits were opened for everyone to freely walk up and down in. This gave everyone an opportunity to see what was really going up close in the garages from the other side. You could see just how full the main stand was with most of the dry seats already taken..

As we continued down the pits, we found a nifty little garage filled with 3 new IS-Fs. The cars were being used for driving a lucky few passengers around for some hot laps. Taxi driving was taken care of by drivers like Juichi Wakasaka And Hiroaki Ishiura, both from GT500. I don’t need the driver, so I think I’ll just take that dark blue one hiding in the back there..

Here’s Team Petronas’ Juichi Wakisaka taking said lucky few out. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard that name before, Juichi is a regular presenter for Best Motoring DVD and his brother, Shigekazu, was also a SuperGT driver.

But the main draw card of the day was the F1, so Toyota had set up a few cool hands on exhibits to display what they’d been getting up to during their short time in F1. Here is one of the older style V10 engines exhaust manifolds on display. At race temperature, these manifolds see close to 1000deg Celsius, but luckily this one wasn’t so hot.

And here are some parts from the TF102, TF103 and TF104 versions of the car. The center/front wing from the TF104 weighed in at just 1212 grams! One great thing about Japan and this festival is that Toyota let anyone pick up and play with the items, not like overseas where everything is chained off and out of reach.

Here the team was getting ready for their last run, a thorough mix of happiness and sadness on everyone’s face.

One more time… *sob*

And the coolest way to send out an F1 car ever? Well, why not jack it up, hook the car up to a laptop and make the highly responsive V10 engine play the classic ‘Time to say goodbye’ by Andrea Bocelli. Check the backfire under the wing too! Definitely a sight and sound worth spending a cold day outside for.

Whilst this is the last piece of coverage from this year’s TMSF, we’re already looking forward to going back to Fuji Speedway this weekend for some more fun as Nissan holds its own Festival, the NISMO festival! These few weeks have given us almost back to back action and tomorrow we’re looking forward to bringing you more cars and photos from NISMO fest. Stay tuned everyone!

Part I
Part II

Peter Horniak

Images/Text: Peter Horniak