For many, it wasn't the vehicles rolling off assembly lines that captured our hearts, but rather, what the legendary Japanese tuning houses did with those bone-stock cars. Names like Top Secret, HKS, Mine's, and Spoon elevated Japanese sports cars with their unique panache, building visually extravagant balls-out land missiles, which in turn elevated the tuners to the enthusiast top shelf, sitting alongside the automakers themselves.
These wild and wonderful tuner cars filled the pages of magazines like Super Street and Sport Compact Car. They featured in wild videos you could only dig up on obscure web forums, or have passed on a bootleg DVD from a friend, wherein pearl-gold 800-horse Supras moved like hypersonic ghosts along unnamed Japanese highways through the static of grainy homemade camcorder footage. What a time to be alive.
These cars, combined with the new and novel ways in which we discovered them, turned "JDM" from a secret-handshake acronym into a lifetime of devotion. It's surprising then, that there's no better place to understand the impact of these tuners on our own import culture than at a shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut, thousands and thousands of miles from Japanese shores.
"This era of tuning, it wasn't just about going fast, it was about being cool," staff writer Chris Rosales notes in this expansive shop tour of Redline Restorations, right after poring over every detail on one of Smokey Nagata's legendary, record-breaking, magnificent Top Secret Supras.
If you have even the most cursory understanding of Japanese tuner culture, you're in for a treat. But if you're like us—obsessed with this era and these machines—you'll find a portal to youth and fantasy housed under Redline's roof.
