In the first years after the initial Rocket Bunny overfender equipped car, Kei Miura from TRA Kyoto was busy designing wide body kits for different chassis. One of the most interesting was the kit created in collaboration with Sarto Racing for the Mercedes-Benz W209 CLK.
It’s been ten years since Dino photographed Sarto Racing’s demo machine outside Fuji Speedway for a feature that was very well received at the time. How well does the extra-fat CLK look aged ten years later? Damn right, we think, but you’ll be the judge after checking out this week’s throwback post…
2014 Feature
If someone were to ask me to make an observation about the Japanese car scene – one big thing I noticed during my time here, I would have to point out the obvious increase in imported cars. Over the past twenty years, European and, to some extent, American car manufacturers have enjoyed a boom in sales, and this being Japan, the aftermarket industry has followed suit. And considering that the Japanese probably can’t do anything wrong with cars, that’s a very good thing. That bold statement, I know. Don’t get me wrong – even the Japanese can get it wrong sometimes, but I would go a step further here and say that they generally have very good taste and know exactly how to make cars look like that. best. As soon as expensive cars drop in value, it is a given that people and tuners will play with them more.
That’s pretty much how Sarto Racing came into being: a brand new company, founded last November, that made a hit with the release of their E36 widebody aero kit, which was created in collaboration with Kei Miura at Rocket Bunny. The idea behind all this was to start with customization – Tailor means tailor in Italian: custom body kits for a variety of imports, and while the BMW convertible did its job well, it was their Tokyo Auto Salon car that had to make even more of an impact.
Apart from the very limited edition AMG versions, I have to say I never really paid much attention to the W209 CLK. Like most Benzes, it was intended to provide more comfort than anything else, and well, that’s not particularly interesting to me at this point in my life. But when I entered the Makuhari Messe last month during the show’s build-up, I was strangely drawn to the W209 you see here.
Like many people who saw it for the first time, I didn’t know what to think. What was it? A drift car? A time attack car? A DTM-inspired replica? It didn’t matter to me That no matter how sensational it looked in the dimly lit exhibition center. As with the latest range of Miura-provided aero packages, the Sarto Racing conversion consists of chunky fenders bolted over the cut-out stock wheel arches for that undeniably simple but impossibly effective instant dose of badass.
Okay, I hear you, this Rocket Bunny look has been over-inflated lately, but let’s be honest, is there anything wrong with it? The truth of the matter is the rawness of the kyusha– Racer work look makes any car instantly cooler. The old recipe of pumped up fenders is one that many manufacturers and tuning shops have used to spruce up regular production cars, and it would be wrong to simply dismiss its effectiveness as we have seen it applied to many cars.
For Sarto Racing, Miura decided to keep things quite simple, avoiding the need for side skirts and focusing only on the large radius wideners, which consist of two parts for each of the CLK’s four corners: a main section and a small one finisher that extends to the new width on the bumper.
The sleek profile of the W209 has therefore been changed and now looks more like a touring car than a comfortable luxury coupe. Seeing that there aren’t that many tuning parts for this generation of CLK in Japan, Yoshimori-san from Sarto Racing contacted Yellow Speed Racing, who collaborated on the project and custom-built a set of adjustable suspensions, making the car properly lowered over all four wheels.
The rear is finished with a cut-out lower bumper section with a small but visually aggressive integrated diffuser, and as with every Miura creation to date, there are plenty of visible rear tires to admire from this particular angle!
Atop the trunk lid sits the unmissable GT wing, held up by an original molded pair of struts.
Now, like me, you probably like the lines of this kit, but you also wonder what this car was built for. Well, as Yoshimori-san told me at Fuji when I met him to photograph the car, the main idea was to come up with a unique road car project. But as you’ll see later, he took the whole idea a little further than that.
With the stock fenders cut and the aero kit tested, it was time to paint the bodywork a color worthy of that intimidating stance, and I have to say they couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate shade of candy red. In the right kind of light it does a good job of emphasizing the broad shoulders that the DTM-style front end now possesses.
To add a touch of contrast, the Mercedes-Benz grille and emblem were painted in semi-gloss black, with parts like the front splitter and of course the wheels matching.
As with many show or stand-driven cars, the wheels are probably one of the most important aspects of the build, and that is very much the case here.
The matte black 18-inch Enkei RS05RRs were carefully chosen with the right kind of offset, allowing the large flared fenders to be adequately filled. Widths of 10.5 inches and 11 inches were chosen for the front and rear respectively, fitted with Toyo Proxes rubber measuring 245/35 front and 275/35 rear.
Yellow Speed Racing provided their top-of-the-line braking package, consisting of six-pot front and four-pot rear calipers mounted alongside oversized, cross-drilled and slotted rotors.
The drop in ride height has introduced quite a few degrees of negative camber at the rear; not quite VIP-like onikyan, but enough to give it an even more imposing appearance.
The main goal for this car was to get it ready in time for the 2014 Tokyo Auto Salon, create that impact to gain some brand recognition, and then focus on refining it and maximizing its purpose. For now, the CLK is nothing more than a wildly styled road car, but Yoshimori-san is just getting started.
With the exterior taken care of, there was one more part of the car that needed to be completed prior to the show and that was the interior.
One look here and you know that this is a project that has been approached with great attention to detail. The idea was to give a sort of street/drift feel, starting with a fairly extensive stripping of the stock trim and the introduction of a stock roll cage.
The driver and passenger sit on supportive yet comfortable Bride Zeta III fixed bucket seats, equipped with TAKATA Racing harnesses for added restraint during occasional track use. The center console, where the navigation screen once sat, has been converted to neatly group the custom switch panel that controls basic things like the ignition, windshield wipers and an electrical off switch. A Wilwood brake preload adjuster is there to help the driver fine-tune the braking system to a given situation, while a hydraulic e-brake from Yellow Speed Racing locks the rear Toyos with the slightest pull of the gold lever.
In Japan, the W209 CLK was only offered with an automatic transmission, so Yoshimori-san had to source the six-speed manual transmission the car now runs with – along with the clutch pedal/booster setup – from Germany. The conversion is the first step in turning the CLK into a more performance-oriented car.
On the approach roads to the Fuji Speedway, the Sarto look certainly gives a unique feel to the sleek Benz, but by now you’re probably wondering what this thing is hiding under the hood?
A rush to get the car ready for show meant the engine had to be put on the back burner, with the stock 2.6L V6 left untouched for the time being.
Yoshimori-san still doesn’t know which engine will replace the standard 170 hp engine. Everything from a big supercharged AMG V8 to a more powerful V6 has been considered – something that will bring the performance on par with the wild looks.
For now, at least, Ortas Cars has fabricated a custom exhaust system with carbon-finished twin tailpipes to give the somewhat asthmatic stock six-cylinder a more raspy engine note.
The custom headlight air intake directs air to one side of the engine, perhaps not much use at the moment as there’s nothing to really cool it, but maybe Yoshimori-san is thinking ahead here? Can anyone say it: turbo? Uhm, maybe an inline six-cylinder engine could go there. Who knows!
Miura-san’s influence on the Japanese car scene is certainly an unprecedented phenomenon; Never before has one man made such a difference on such a wide variety of cars in such a short time. Sarto Racing has brought perhaps two of the most unique projects to the market and made quite an impact in the process. It goes without saying that we can’t wait to see this CLK burn some rubber around a drift track once it gets a more suitable power plant, but at the same time we’re also wondering what car they’ll be working on next. 2014 is sure to be a continuation of the factory fender revolution, Rocket Bunny style!
The Speedhunters
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Dino Dalle Carbonare
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dino@speedhunters.com