FOUR DOOR VERTEX: Car Make T&E Mark II Tribe event

I was at the 2014 1JZ Meeting when I was handed a flyer for an event called “Mark II Tribe” being held by Car Make T&E at Fuji Speedway’s Drift Course.

A Mark II-only event? I’m there!

As I expected, not every car there was a Mark II, but there were more than enough other kinds of JZXs and other interesting cars to make up for it.

This is the Car Make T&E demo car for their Vertex Ridge complete widebody kit.

It was also fitted with an experimental high-mount Borg-Warner turbo setup that T&E are thinking about marketing.

One of the names you’d associate with “JZX” is Tsuyoshi Tezuka. He brought along his D1GP Mark II and a few sets of Goodyear Eagle Sport RS tyres.

He took advantage of the Fuji Speedway Drift Course’s simple layout to practice driving at the angle limits of the car.

Stock Mark II Tourer V on the right, bolt-on fenders on the left.

The Vertex Ridge kit is fairly subtle despite being quite wide.

Team Fool leader Okajima’s Verossa. Watch it in action at Tsukuba Circuit on this video.

I noticed the calipers had a bit of a funny colour. It turns out he tried painting them with glow-in-the-dark paint to see how they looked at night. According to him, it turns out that it didn’t work so well!

It’s a street-drifting car, so it has a street interior.

Speaking of Verossas, here’s the original Verossa drifter Hirota’s current D1GP car, a JZX110 Mark II.

It looks good and goes hard.

T04Z and NOS. Engine response should be pretty good with this setup.

JZX81 Cresta pics coming up, because some of you dig them.

I dig them too. Love that long sedan shape.

This Chaser was nice and neat from the front.

The aero on the rear was a little rough though. Red seems to suit the shape quite well.

Unlike boxy ’80s interiors, bland ’90s interiors (this is from ’89 if you want to nitpick) have aged a lot better.

The X81 shape is definitely a lot more popular overseas than it is in Japan, simply because there aren’t a whole lot of them left!

Waiting to get up to no good.

One again, the Gazelle Punch Audi.

I mean, Mark II!

One of my favourite street JZXs, belonging to Kaneda-san from Nagano.

If you want to get into the budget JZX game in Japan, this kind of JZX90 Mark II would be the sort of car you’d end up with.

Remember Manabu Mitsumori’s JZX100 Chaser before he changed over to the Corolla world? It’s still kicking around.

It still has the same setup as before.

Those thermowrapped blast pipes and Hakosuka wing make it.

There were AE86s there too, because why not?

Some guy’s sticker.

Some guy in his Cresta.

I think he’s a bit lost, because this isn’t an industrial area in Tokyo somewhere.

I’ll take a closer look at this Mark II wagon with a 1JZ-GTE in another post.

Remember the LeSeyde I posted a while back? It’s been painted gold.

Beep beep. Get out of the way, I’m a LeSeyde.

A semi trailer somewhere is missing its tail lights.

The fact it’s based on an S15 Silvia chassis is really obvious once you look inside.

It even has a Nismo dash!

This SR20-powered FD has been around for a while.

Enough weirdness. Let’s get back to the JZXs.

This is the Mark X that was driven to the top of the 2014 D1GP championship by Takahashi Kuniyaki.

Actually it’s not. It’s just a regular Mark II stickered up to look like the real thing.

This makes it easy to see how wide the Vertex Ridge kit really is.

My Mark II currently wears aero by Missile, similar to this one being driven by Missile K&M’s boss Miyamoto.

I couldn’t quite catch it blowing flames when shooting from the rear.

I wonder who makes this front bumper with the Murcielago scoops?

Love that hunched up sedan shape.

Time for some trains!

They were doing this consistently for an entire session.

I need to get my Mark II up and running again soon. Seriously.

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This post was written by Alexi