www.nemisisuk.com

www.redlineamericanmuscle.co.uk

Clive has more than 30 years experience of racing and race preparation in a wide variety of disciplines and an even bigger range of cars.

As authorised distributors for Surf City Garage car care products, Shy Auto is ideally placed to deliver effective car detailing products.

Shy Auto Developments Limited also trades under the domain names of www.mazdarotaryparts.com supplying standard and performance car parts for owners of the Mazda RX-8 through to the Old Skool Classics. This shop has been successfully trading online since June 2006.

Also www.racingbeateurope.com, authorised dealer for Racing Beat Inc of America, supplying quality race parts and more for Mazda MX-5, RX-8, RX-7 and Old Skool Classic cars.

www.shyauto.com

November 2015

Make sure you grab your November issue of American Car Magazine, featuring a bright Hugger Orange Chevelle on the cover. Inside there’s a kool kustom Plymouth that narrowly missed being a Christine rep, the Brits at Hockenheim, the Can-Am weekender, the Hayride and more hot summer shows and races than you can shake a slightly wobbly bit of chrome windscreen trim at… get yours now.

Ed’s Letter Issue #146
Earlier this year, my daily driver was a 30-year old Nissan Sunny. I thought it’d be interestingly ‘retro’, but its age was the only remarkable aspect of the car. It wasn’t really cutting it for me, but back in early June I happened upon a replacement. I came across an early Lexus LS400. I’d been looking for a cheap one for a while to use as a donor car for another project, and this one cropped up in west London. It had a month’s MoT, 130k on the clock and was very cheap indeed, so I bought it. I drove it back to the Midlands from Harrow, and all thoughts of it becoming a donor car immediately went right out of the window. The 4.0 V8 wafted me up the M40 in near silence, in complete comfort, and returned almost 30mpg. And it had cupholders!

Since then, the only things I’ve found that don’t work are the LCD display for the climate control on the dash – apparently a common fault on the LS400 – and the interior courtesy light is discourteous. I put it through an MoT, and the only item the tester could find to comment upon was that the offside headlamp washer wasn’t particularly efficient. Prior to the test, I’d had to replace one number plate lamp bulb and the wiper blades, which were both marked ‘Toyota’ and therefore probably more than 20 years old. The exhaust was the one it left the factory with; the fan belt was also the original. The paint is awful – it looks like it’s been washed with a Scotchbrite pad once a month since 1992 – but there’s no rust.

This was the car that Toyota launched in 1989 to show the American market what a luxury sedan should be. Nobody in the US would buy a luxury car with a Toyota badge because, well, Toyota made cheap hatchbacks, didn’t they? The Lexus brand was born, presumably, when Toyota looked at the likes of Cadillac and Lincoln and said, “Ha, ha! What a road of clap!”

Because, for some reason, in my mind, Toyota’s fleet of engineering geniuses all talk with a politicallyincorrect Benny Hill-style accent. “This Cadirrac is borrocks! Let’s show them how it’s done.” And so Toyota took an R&D budget that would buy a whole developing nation (or a semi in London) and their reserves of experience, and created a luxury sedan to convert the USA. They had to get it right first time; there would be no second chance. It looks like they did. Engines that would plod along in silence for hundreds of thousands of miles, silky automatics that rarely ever needed rebuilding, surgical panel gaps, top quality materials… they built them to last. No, it’s not pretty, but the contemporary Cadillacs were hardly cutting-edge design and besides, if you’re in the driver’s seat you don’t have to look at it. And even now, there’s not a squeak or rattle to be heard, the doors still close perfectly, and, when you wash it with a hose pipe, the interior and boot are as dry afterwards as they were before!

Unheard-of! No, I’m not defecting to the Far East, I still love my American machinery and doubtless always will, but from this one car, for which I got change from £300, it’s frighteningly easy to see how the Japanese stormed the luxury car market in the States – Lexus, Acura, Infiniti et al. What’s even more frightening is how long it took the American brands to catch up…