Taking another look at the climate of sport compact tuning; in this careful economy, it's no mistake why events like Time Attack are popular with the "show and prove" audiences in Japan, and why it will only grow in popularity with sport compact car enthusiasts here in the U.S. One look around and it's clear the so-called U.S. Performance Tuning industry is undergoing painful contraction. The tuning industry grew too big, too fast without substantiation from enthusiasts. Enthusiasts in the U.S. are fed up with being force fed mediocre products that do nothing but add cosmetics from companies who fraudulently market a lifestyle they know nothing about. More than one or two U.S.-based companies selling clear light kits, bulbs and mufflers who called themselves "performance companies" have been crushed into permanent paralysis under huge returns from the likes of Circuit City. They've had to suck up to the VCs or beg to be bought out. These companies need not worry, nor jump on the bandwagon, Time Attack is not for those brands, and they have nothing to contribute as products that don't truly enhance a car's performance. Companies like these are quickly and forever forgotten.
Hardcore, fanatical tuning is played out and the shift is influencing the streets and building momentum for Time Attack, making more "street-able" tuning the wave of the future. It is rumored that tuning celebrities like Keiichi Tsuchiya (and other Japanese tuning luminaries) and tuning company heads like Yashio Factory are vociferous in opinion that hardcore tuning elements such as roll cages is pass (and that power-to-weight ratio is and forever will be the holy litany in performance), which if true, renders Time Attack to be all the more a burgeoning up-and-coming motorsports interest. Time Attack is comprised of truly street-able cars, and all of the so-called record holders at one time or another in Time Attack are always understood and prefaced as street cars in Time Attack reportage.
Attending a RevSpeed- or Option2-presented Time Attack at Tsukuba is like going to other high-echelon motorsports events in Japan. Tsukuba Circuit, in Ibaragi, Japan, is famous for its multiple wicked hairpin turns, breezy straight-aways and the tight corners that require pimp-player smoothness. Hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, attend to see which cars and records are going for broke, with the requisite umbrella girls and typical tuning company branding all over the place. When videos are filmed it's extremely well attended and good sportsmanship along with trademark trackside goofs are the usual behavior that becomes filmed fodder, along with each team's multiple tries for best times.
Limits do exist, and classes are organized for Time Attack runs: FWD against FWD, RWD, AWD and others run against each other, as well as battle in tests in and out of class, with no greater than V8 setups allowed to compete against each other. Occasionally they do hold larger-than-life battles for wild exotics or other series cars that are not street-able, such as Best Motoring's Super Battles with the likes of Lambos and Ferraris going at it. Other professional drivers try to give it a shot in circuit cars. These are circuit-tuned race cars that have reportedly recorded insanely fast times on the famous 1.294 mile Tsukuba Circuit, such as the Formula Nippon car that snagged a 47-second time, next to another reported circuit car, a JGTC NSX doing a rumored 53 seconds.
With Time Attack, like other things, you're only as good as your last performance, and record holders switch up right quick as do the models that garner the fastest times, so the last recorded 55-point-something-seconds you may have read about in other magazines is a record no longer. First announced in the U.S. by ImportTuner, the most recent known record is held by tuning powerhouse HKS with their all-carbon Evo VIII TRB-02 (Tsukuba Record Breaker Number Two) driven by the popular Nobuteru Tanaguchi. The fastest time so far of 54.739 seconds was recorded at the most recent Video Option Super Lap Challenge 2004. Other players in the game who have at one time or another toggled with record holding are A'PEXi and their AP Engineering shop's S15, the Signal Auto Team and their R34 and Jun with their Hyper Lemon Evo V competing off and on against its own sister car, the Super Lemon WRX STi.
In the streets, Time Attack is a lot like old school b-boys battling with a challenge to uprock for title of King of the Streets, it's the true underground test, no long conversations or words, no debates, just title of baddest street car goes to Time Attack record holder-'nuff said!
When all of the fanatical tuning fads come and go, Japanese sport compact tuning is and will always be about overall performance, so in due time, when Time Attack reaches the U.S. it will probably evolve into its own category of legitimacy as a motorsport or at the very least will be brought to the U.S. as another import spectator event and slowly gain steam from there. But in the meantime, if you are all about Time Attack, get your street cars battle ready and tune your senses to the East.