FAST AND MODIFIED

It’s every mans dream come true, to have two of the hottest twins in the world at your beck and call, eager to please, perform and generally jump through hoops on command. The lucky man in this instance is none other than Gary Finney from HKS Europe who not only gets to look after these fine beauties but also rides them hard and fast at every opportunity…
It was a chance encounter at last year’s Autosport show in Birmingham that eventually led to this double whammy feature. The F&M team were down checking things out and trying our best to take in the sheer size of the operation when I spotted the RS1 HKS car sitting proudly on display for all to see. Being the first time I’d seen the beast in person I took a bit of time to go round it and check out the modifications on show. Before long Gary had spotted my keen interest in the vehicle and came over to introduce himself and the rest is history. The RS1 made its maiden voyage to Scotland a few months later when Grant and Andy from AWD Motorsport in Perth arranged for Gary, the HKS team and Chris from Rampage to bring the car up for their 2005 open day. Gary claims to never have driven the car in anger before this point but the way he managed to get the S15 to slide around on cue and in perfect formation in one of the smallest roads known to man makes me think otherwise. After putting on a show for the punters gathered in Perth I knew F&M had to get a hold of that car, no matter what the cost. I kept in touch with Gary over the remaining months of 2005 and when explained that the RS2 HKS demo car was going to be coming to the UK shortly I told him we’d be well up for a southerly visit to check it out. It took us a little longer than expected but eventually a month ago we made good on our promise and set off for sunny Cambridgeshire to do the deed.

HKS had recently moved into new, larger premises out in the sticks but thanks to the Garmin sat nav we didn’t have to muck around too much to find it. Arriving a good few hours before schedule (a first when it comes to Eddie and me) we parked up beside such prestige and performance cars as Gary’s own Abbey Motorsport tuned Astra – or maybe that was just a sticker he got free with a magazine. Entering the Fort Knox like entrance to the building we waited and eventually a bespectacled, clean shaven gent appeared and ushered us inside. “We’re here to see Gary Finney” I announced before receiving a puzzled glare from the man stood in front of us. “That would be me you Muppet” Gary uttered – doh! It turns out that he looks a lot different in his 9 to 5 clobber than the HKS pit rags adorned at the weekend, plus a bath and razor had obviously been employed recently to complete the transformation.
Being in his natural habitat Gary spent a good few hours explaining all about HKS, both in Japan and the UK; where the performance scene is going and most importantly for us, all about the S15 demo cars we’d travelled hundreds of miles to see. During our conversation he had us in stitches with his Jack Dee like dead pan anecdotes about life, cars and everything else. I’m trying my best to convince him to write a column for F&M taking random pot shots at everyone and everything but he says we couldn’t afford his hourly fee. After talking at length he made us a cup of tea (which I was told to mention as “I don’t just make tea for anyone, you are very privileged people”) and took us out to the HKS warehouse to meet the Nissan’s

Perfectly clean and symmetrically aligned, the two radiant S15’s sat commanding their corner of the complex. Gary had created a fine nest with plastic flooring, an engine bench, lighting, a spares rack and a range of tools to carry out any servicing on the cars. Being completely honest it took us a long time to figure out how to distinguish between the two cars but Gary told us the secret. “The MD here could never tell which car was which so we changed the sun strip on one of them to give him a better than 50/50 chance”. Externally the cars do look almost identical, with only a few tale tell signs to give you any clue at all. Apart from the sun strip the seats are different and if you look through the front end of the cars, oil coolers are visible on the RS1 but are mysteriously absent from the RS2. “The RS1 was the prototype drift car for HKS in Japan with the RS2 using the finalised products. One of the main areas we worked on with the latter car was to move everything of importance away from the front end of the car as they tend to shed front bumpers at an alarming rate we wouldn’t want to loose oil coolers, radiators and other important components when the valance separated. What the engineers did was to take the intercooler, radiator and other parts and place them behind the cross member so if there was any cosmetic damage to the front, these parts wouldn’t need to be replaced. This is also why you cant see the oil coolers on the RS2 as we’ve relocated them to where the back seats would usually be situated, instead building cooling stacks that are force fed cold air from underneath through a set of electric fans”.
Gary continued to amaze us with the cunningly simple logic behind some of the modifications on the cars and left us wondering why other people hadn’t thought of it first. “When a car is designed, like the S15, the cooling systems are designed to work with the car moving in a forward motion. When a car is drifting the airflow doesn’t enter the front of the car anymore so that’s why we’ve moved the oil coolers and adapted the way air is channelled into the front of the car.” Gary explained. Another point to note is that on the RS2 the standard inner wings have been replaced with the arches being opened up a lot more and sections boxed in. The reasoning behind this is again very simple, it allows for a larger turning circle and wheel clearance which in turn allows the car to drift to a greater extent. These cars are engineered so well that in the last year and half since shipping the first to the UK they haven’t suffered one mechanical failure. Sure a few bumpers have been obliterated along with a mountain of used Yokohama rubber but everything right down to the clutch is original. The S15’s are now HKS Europe’s promotional tools having served their time as research and development test vehicles in Japan and now live a life of luxury under the watchful eye of Gary and the rest of the HKS Europe team. Having been completely disassembled and rebuilt almost flawlessly they are what most would call the perfect drift machines and with that in mind HKS Japan have moved on to a new challenge, the Toyota Altezza which is now receiving the same dedication as the Nissan’s did just a few years ago. Don’t be saddened by the fact that there wont be any more technical progress on the S15’s from now on because as driver Nobuteru "Nob" Taniguchi has stated, you cant improve on perfection so why try? The good news for the UK is that the impressive show of just one S15 parading around tracks in 2005 will be doubled and HKS will be taking both cars to events this year to running them both simultaneously for your viewing pleasure. You cant say fairer than that can you.
Image Is Everything:When the first of the S15’s arrived in Britain, Gary and the HKS Europe team knew they had to stamp their own mark on it and what better way to do this than to have new livery created and draped over the paintwork. “We changed the tyres and the graphics but left the setup the same as Nob had left it. I mean, you’d be mad to mess with a car he’d set up!” Gary explained. The problem was that by altering the world famous graphics, a lot of people got pissed off quite quickly. “Changing the graphics on the car really annoyed the purists, the previous livery was so famous with replica die cast toys, t-shirts and everything else fans just weren’t happy. We needed to introduce a new UK identity though so we went ahead and I think its turned out for the best”. The graphics were originally sketched out with pen and paper by the UK HKS team but since they cant draw the experts were soon called in to take over. The experts in this case were SDS Graphics who have worked on touring cars and other global projects in the past. Their graphic designers took the themes, colours and shapes from HKS and produced the Turbee styled decals that now adorn the S15’s.