JDM Asia

*** You can check out the orginal post at the JDM Asia blog by clicking here! ***

Sorry to any of the Evo X fanatics who read this blog, but I always have loved the CT9A series Evos and I can safely say I'd rather have one parked in my garage than one of the new series 10 Evolutions. Hey, that could just be my own misguided personal opinion, however its examples like this one here that make a pretty good argument for my case.

This is a stateside Evo VIII, one of the demo cars hailing from the garage of A Spec Performance. And if you thought the outside of this thing looked overly-aggresive as if it were about to deliver a ball-rending kick to your groin, just wait until you hear what's lurking underneath.

Just about every unecessary piece of embellishment has been removed from the bosom of this Evo, being replaced with an aluminium rear firewall, SPL rollcage, Recaro bench and a Nardi Deep Corn Rally 350 wheel.

As far as the heart of this titan is concerned, the 4G63 was turned over to legendary F1 engine builders Cosworth in order to wring every possible horse out of the Mitsubishi powerplant. The pistons were replaced with CP forged items, while the rings and rods were rejected in favour of pieces that could handle the eventual power output. Cosworth then ported the head, balanced and blueprinted the piston assembly back to the stock crank, added new springs, retainers, valves, camshafts, camgears and then put the whole lot back together.

And as for forced induction, this duty would now be handled by a Garrett 3071 turbocharger which would coerce the rebuilt engine into producing a mighty-excellent 470PS.

Visually the car is decked out with a Gram Lights front bar - which I think is one of the best you can get for this series of Evo - A Spec front fenders, APR carbon mirrors and GT wing, as well as a Seibon bonnet and trunk. As for the rolling stock, a set of Volk RE30s were chosen, which hide some serious Project Mu 4-piston stopping power.

As far as Evos go, they simply don't get much better than this. And if you disagree with me, just remember; I know where you live.

*** Original article can be found at the JDM Asia blog by clicking here! ***

It seems we can't get through a news week without having our eyes assailed with a picture of some rich specimen whose totalled his priceless supercar. Not long ago it was the prize tool who will go down in the history books as the one who destroyed the first ever Nissan GT-R - and on a test drive no less - and this week it's a guy in Chengsha City China who mutilated his rare Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 while showing off and attempting to flick the rear out around a corner.

I know of course that the media is going to pay a lot more attention when a half million dollar piece of exotica is wrecked than for instance if you hit a telegraph pole in your Daewoo Nubira, though it doesn't stop me from wondering if when your wallet size and ego increase, your driving skill decreases substantially.

The old adage "Pride comes before a fall" always springs into mind when I think about this because it always seems to be the case of a overpaid executive trying to impress the commoners on the street with his flamboyant driving skills when things seem to all go wrong.

And whenever I read a story like this, I always feel that smug emotion creep up insde my brain and begin to laugh internally at how much of an idiot you'd have to be to do something like that, but in reality if I had the bankroll to splash out on a Ferrari F430, Nissan GT-R or whatever, would I be any different? Could I possibly have been in exactly the same situation as the Chinese guy who just turned his LP640 into an expensive paperweight?

In reality, I don't think there's one of us alive who wouldn't want to show their car off if they owned something like that. Hell, I know a guy who own an R31 Skyline and he prances around in it like it was a Bugatti Veyron - and most of us in this scene are the same, whether you like to admit it or not. Some of us might not be as adept in the art of showboating as others, but the fact remains we all love to flaunt what we've got.

In retrospect, I do think that an increased wallet does decrease driving skill slightly, simply based on the wank-factor of the car you own. The fact of the matter is, the better the car you own, the higher your likelihood to want to show it off, and the higher the likelihood you're going to do something stupid - like wrecking a GT-R on a test drive, or something.

*** Original post can be found at my blog by clicking here! ***

Let me say right from the start of this post that I love Mother Earth. No really, I do. She provides me with all sorts of things I need like air to breathe, water to cool me down on a hot summer day, and probably most importantly, tasty creatures like swine, bovine and several species of endangered birds to eat. Mother Earth is good to me.

Despite this, I am concerned about how zealous everyone is getting over this whole "save-the-environment" thing of late. I've got no problem with companies like Mitsubishi attempting to create an environmentally sound and power delivering package like they've done with the new Evo X, however I am concerned as to all this other psycho-technical malarkey that's going along with it - things like hydrogen fueled vehicles, electric powered cars and the like.

I've been pondering as to what the late-model car modifying scene will be like in perhaps 20 or 30 years. Instead of bolting turbochargers on cars, will we be installing higher capacity batteries, or heavier gauge electrical cabling to better carry the current to the drive motors built into the very wheels of our cars?

Will people like me and you still exist? Will there even be a market for fossil-fuel burning transport anymore? Or will it become like some kind of ancient relic from the past, a hobby that's partaken in by a select few, kinda like those guys around today who spend insane amuounts of money maintaining historic steam engines and then plodding around in them just for the utter joy of it.

Will that be me in 30 years? Will people like us be looked upon as freaks; relics from an era long passed? Though instead of a steam engine we'll be cowering in our hermetically-sealed garages maintaining a then-historical R34 GT-R or something. And by then I'd assume we'll be buying petrol for our cars in some kind of black market trade as any kind of combustable fuel will most likely have been outlawed or cost in excess of $500 USD per litre.

If that's the way the world is going, It's not something I want to be a part of. I don't want some zero-emission, hyper-industrial hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that propels itself using an electric motor in each wheel housing and only produces the sound of your elated thoughtwaves which you project as a result of creating a better world with your special mode of transport.

I want to burn fossil fuel. I want to feel the resonant vibrations created by the engine flow through my seat and into my scrotum as I plant my right foot into the floor. I want to smell the quasi-sweet odour of spent gases as they exit the rear of the car but most of all, I want to hear that utterly-joyous trumpeting of a BOV sounding its presence to the world as it ejects compressed air back into the atmosphere from whence it came.

Quite simply, I want internal combustion. I'm a testosterone-fueled organism and it's in my genetic makeup to want to burn, destroy, maim, conquer and pillage, and that fits right in with internal combustion. I mean really, how much satisfaction are you going to get from an electric car?

And before you get on your high-horse, I know that electric cars have the potential to accelerate much faster than anything we've created so far with any kind of internal combustion engine, but where's the character? Where's the noise, the feeling, the whole ceremony of it all? It's like the soulless bastard-child of a Scalextric racing set and an LCD TV. I sure as hell know I don't want that.

Really, should we care so much about the environment anyway? Either the Americans, Russians or Koreans are going to nuke the planet, a terrorist group will unleash a virus so potent it will wipe out humanity, or some kind of scientific organisation will inadvertantly create a black hole in a lab which will suck all reality into another plane of existence where we'll all end up being the food of a hyper-intelligent species of insect robots. We're screwed anyway.

And how ironic - Audioslave's Gasoline just began playing on my iTunes. So on that note, can't we just leave the futuristic mumbo-jumbo and burn fuel while we can?

- Leon.

***Original post can be found at my blog by clicking here. ***

This could be the best thing I've ever seen in my life. As I'm yet to see Keira Knightley or Jessica Alba performing sexual acts on me yet, this might just be the next best thing. It's a sushi sandwich.

Let me say that again just in case you missed it. Sushi. Sandwich. Sushi sandwich. Sandwich made from sushi. Sushi-based sandwich.

Don't ask me why, but I had the epiphanic mental brainwave to type sushi sandwich into Google to see if such a thing existed, and like just about anything weird, wonderful or brain-meltingly spun out you can possibly imagine, I found that yes, such a thing did exist. I know I'm screwed up for even thinking about typing such an erroneously mismatched combination into a seach engine, but in this case it did yield interesting and rather amusing results.

I found several examples of what people were daring to call a sushi sandwich, with variations ranging from using bread instead of rice, but none of them were actually what looked or acted like a real sandwich. But then I found the example created by a German lady called Marion, posted on her website called Marion's Kochbuch.

Now the website is in German and I'm shame to say that despite my Austrian-Australian heritage I'm not fluent in the language, however a quick visit to Altavista's Babel Fish (mmm...fish) translation page garnered me the recipe details I was after.

It's the real deal, my friends. Raw Laschfilet (salmon), with cucumber, wasabi mayonnaise, radish, all between two slices of toasted bread ardorned with seaweed nori sheets, served with pickled ginger on the side. This is the food of royalty. It's a humble amalgamation of things both Japanese and English, created by a German. If that's not a symbol of peace for all the world to look on at with awe, I simply don't know what is.

If you want to check out the sushi sandwich in all its glory, you can click here to check it out (at the blog only). After this, I'll bet poor Marion will have no idea why she received such an enormous boost in traffic so if you can help it, try not to crash her server.

It's a sushi sandwich. Praise be to all that is holy.