For the past 15 years I have owned a workshop in Auckland, New Zealand, servicing, building and tuning Japanese race and road cars. JTuneand some of the vehicles I have worked on over the last fifteen years have been featured on Speedhunters before. After a busy few years I finally decided to take a break from working full time at the shop and have a few adventures in Japan.
My first trip this year was for the Tokyo Auto Salon, where I also went to Fuji to meet HKS about a special Toyota GR86 project. I returned in mid-summer to check the progress of the constructionand also visit some other shops. One of them was Car Shop Glow.
Even though I missed 7’s Day (7/7) in Japan by a week, I was determined to visit one of Tokyo’s most renowned RX-7 stores and find out more about it. Car shop Glow is best known today for its custom LED lighting, but the company also provides maintenance and complete car construction from a modest building in Nerima-ku, close to the heart of the Japanese capital.
Car Shop Glow was founded in 2006, with owner Yukimitsu Hara initially selling his LED lighting products online. In April 2008, he opened a showroom, focusing primarily on customizing American and European cars.
In 2009, a customer – who was a manager at Super Autobacs – offered Hara-san his ex-Knight Sports Mazda RX-7, which he no longer drove, for a price he couldn’t refuse. Not wanting to miss out on the opportunity, Hara-san purchased the FD3S, marking the beginning of the Car Shop Glow demo car.
Hara-san drove the RX-7 to the Tsukuba circuit in the same configuration he had purchased the car in. He posted a lap time of 1:06 on 17-inch street tires, setting the benchmark for future upgrades.
At the time, many of the other FD3S RX-7s in the Tsukuba paddock were equipped with RE Amemiya widebody kits, so Hara-san had one installed and finished off the exterior with a new coat of paint and a set of his own taillights. The kit upgrade allowed for wider tires, which led to a return to Tsukuba as soon as possible, where Hara-san improved his TC2000 PB lap time to an impressive 1:02.
From that moment on he was addicted to Time Attack.
As Hara-san continued to participate in time attack events, proudly flying the Car Shop Glow flag, the company began to receive orders for taillights from Japan and overseas, further boosting the company’s brand awareness.
In response, Car Shop Glow expanded its lineup to include lights for other models – including the Toyota Supra, Honda S2000 and NSX, and the Subaru Impreza – and ventured into aerodynamic parts, exhausts and suspension, all of which are now sold in Japan and abroad.
Over the years, Hara-san’s FD3S has evolved through various time attacks, becoming lighter, more aerodynamic and more powerful. You can read all about it in Dino’s 2015 article.
The RX-7’s best time around the Tsukuba Circuit is an impressive 56.4-second lap, set with the OEM-based brakes and the deleted factory ABS. The setup may raise some eyebrows, but given the TC2000’s short track layout with only a few heavy braking zones, it stands to reason that balanced, easy-to-warm brakes would be more effective than a bulky brake setup. Sometimes simplicity wins out, especially if you don’t want to spend a ton of time fine-tuning brake balance and bias.
Currently, the RX-7 is completely stripped down, with big plans in the offing. When I asked Hara-san about his goals for the car, he told me he wants to push the boundaries and go even faster; a 53-second lap is the dream.
In Tokyo and other Asian cities, physical space is a real luxury, but when it comes to custom cars, that doesn’t mean build quality is compromised. Many enthusiasts build impressive machines right in their driveways or garages at home. One example is another Car Shop Glow RX-7: Tani-sans wanted ‘GT race car for the road’, as recently presented by Toby.
On the occasion of our visit, Car Shop Glow arranged for a number of customer cars to stop at the workshop and then set off in a convoy.
Given Hara-san’s penchant for time attack racing, it’d be easy to assume that the other aggressively styled RX-7s outside of Car Shop Glow were a race car. While some of these builds do appear on the track, most are strictly road-going machines that take heavy inspiration from Hara-san’s FD3S. Regardless of how modified they are under the hood, it’s still pretty cool to see these cars out on the road.
I would like to thank Hara-san and the staff at Car Shop Glow for opening their doors to us, and to everyone who brought their cars. Stay tuned for the night cruise!
Jacky Tse
Instagram: jtune_nz
Photography by As Bechan
Instagram: pixeltoon_media
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