Chp4 – Not as it seems…

As Rob woke up, dressed, and went down to see if the paper had arrived, he found a picture album in front of his door. He picked it up on his way back and went back inside. Curiously he sat down and opened the album. It started with a picture of four guys standing next to each other laughing. They were all wearing old T shirts and overalls, some up to their wastes, some all the way on. The next page showed a small garage with a couple of cars in front of it. He saw a black Datsun 260 coupe, a white Mazda RX4 coupe, a silver Mitsubishi Scorpion*, and a Green Toyota TE27 Corolla. The next showed them working on their cars. The whole album was full of these pictures, but with different cars over time. It seemed to be a kind of timeline from the eighties. The last page showed three of the guys again, this time they looked a bit older. They where holding a picture of the missing guy. “No way” Rob thought suddenly focusing on one of the guys in the picture, “that’s Yoshua!”.
Yoshua is the guy living downstairs. He’s in his early fourties, has dark, shoulder length hair, and green eyes. He really looks older than he is, probably cause of the small gotee he has. Yoshua owns a Honda city, but he had told Rob awhile ago that he was looking to sell it. Rob quickly looked through the pictures again. It seemed Yoshua had owned the black Datsun 260 Coupe. Some pics showed him working extensively on the engine: cleaning, fine tuning, working the pistons and the gearbox. It definitely looked like it was fast. It had some nice multispoke deep dish rims which Rob could not identify.
He was very excited by the fact that the guy below him loved cars as much as Hiroki and he did, so he quickly took a shower, dressed and went down stairs to get the story from Yoshua.
As Yoshua opened the door Rob held up the album, “Very cool!” he said smiling. Yoshua smiled and let him in. “I thought you would like it, has Hiroki seen it?”. Rob said he hadn’t, so he went to go wake Hiroki up and told him to get down there. After five minutes they were all together talking. “Well I wanted you guys to see the album for two reasons. For one, I loved cars as much as you guys do and second I wanted to warn you guys. I see you guys working on your cars and going out almost every Saturday. It was pretty obvious, the highway, am I right?”. “Yea, but why?” Hiroki answered. “Well, my friends and I used to race as well. Of course we started like you guys, a nice pair of rims, maybe a different exhaust and some new springs. But then you want more, its like an addiction. So, there came some new cams, pistons, etc, basically everything we could afford. We became faster and faster and soon we started thinking about really becoming a team. We decided to become Team Bird Cage. We used to run the highways around Yokohama, mostly because we all lived there. One night a team from Isehara, The Black Darts, came over and challenged a couple of teams to a touge race. We were one of the teams that were challenged. Of course we agreed and the the day of the race came soon. As a friend of mine, Jinsu, the one with the corolla, was getting ready to race I felt there was something wrong. A couple of cars had gone down the mountain just before the race started. This was weird because they already had people standing at the base of the mountain warning traffic. When both cars had left the starting line it was a game of waiting. I had gotten into my car quickly to chase because I wasn’t sure what to think. About half way I saw something horrific. The guard rail was ripped apart, something that hadn’t been there when they had gone up. As I stopped the car, I saw smoke rising up. It was the corolla which caught fire. He was trapped and couldn’t get out. I tried to climb down the side but I couldn’t get a grip on the brick side. I could hear him screaming, but I couldn’t get to him.” Yoshua stopt for a brief second and closed his eyes, “My point is, racing is dangerous. Don’t go out without knowing the risks and don’t think its all fun and games. Racing is for real and people can get hurt.” Hiroki and Rob sat in silence for a moment and thought it through as Yoshua got up and got something to drink. “Pepsi anyone?”. As they drank the Pepsi, Rob and Hiroki had both asked question about Yoshua’s past. It seems they had a small garage in Yokohama where they tuned and repaired cars. He also had some friends that still owned garages and some even went on to become famous for their tuning. Eventually they started talking about the future. Yoshua wanted to set up a shop soon and Hiroki and Rob were ready to join him if he did. Some of his friends could hook him up with some cheap second hand tools and get him some deals on supplies. He just needed a good location, but this was nothing to worry about.

Garage Redox was born…

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*also known as Sapporo or Galant Lambda