Set your eyes on a Stateside import magazine for a minute and they lure you in with a blur of competitive stories about every niche you could imagine: quarter mile speeds of the latest American O.E.-sponsored sport compact drag cars, wild-eyed newbies burning rubber in their newly converted drift cars sponsored by Mom and Dad, show cars that never see the blacktop of streets, performance products and cosmetic vanity items, category car clubs and the latest must-attend moonlight shows. It's a veritable a whirlwind of mostly meaningless infomercials. With that said, it's good to know that in Japan the tuning companies, magazines and people devoted to cars keep it simple with Time Attack.
Huh?!? Time Attack, you ask? Well, if you watch CNN, you know we are in a historical time cycle where once again, the tide of influence flows from the East to West, and Time Attack is headed this way. In the U.S., cars wind up in magazine features for a variety of reasons-mostly competitive ones. Quite often you'll see competing stories floating around on numerous pages of different magazines about the same Japanese cars claiming their credentials, along with a long list of engine specs and beautiful photos from every angle, but let's pause for a moment and explore the way Japanese tuning houses squash the beef: Time Attack. To a Japanese performance tuning company, Time Attack is simply the most comprehensive overall performance of a finely tuned street car around a race meeting circuit-in particular, the Tsukuba Circuit.
It's also known as Lap Attack, but we'll stick with Time Attack, since that's more common. To put it bluntly, it's a bring-your-best-weapon-and-may-the-best-man-win kind of show. Because there are so many well-groomed, seriously world-class circuits in Japan, and motorsports is taken so seriously, it's understandable why Time Attack started there. Although Time Attacks are every so often run at Suzuka Raceway, where Formula One runs their race meetings, or the world famous Mt. Fuji Raceway, the recognized times come from meetings held at Tsukuba Circuit. These are the time standards to beat at Time Attack.
Time Attack isn't really a motorsport per se yet, it's more of a proving ground competition, competing with the clock and each other's best times, but we predict it could become more than a testing category, for a number of reasons. In the U.S. we usually have rigid rules, politicized jurisdiction and governing bodies to lay claim to something or seize things up, while we try to legitimize it, but in Japan, motorsports is so wholly embraced and such a part of people's conscious lives, that motoring past times that continue to exist on their own strength of influence can eventually become motorsports.
Consider then, that interest in Time Attack is more than an interest in a category shootout for sport compact cars, it's also a sign of the times, a collective unconscious shift in values, a definitive disconnect from certain aspects of cosmetic and fanatical tuning. Time Attack's popularity is the shift of the tides for companies whose products dress a car up with empty promises of products in full packaging. If Time Attack gains momentum, no longer can companies with simply catch-phrase-y, feel good-y brand names or pretty mufflers that don't serve any purpose survive in an arena where performance is the real qualifier. Time Attack represents hard values of the statistical and pragmatic kind that speak volumes about what products work.
The Eastern flowing waves of influence are already here, as with drifting, it is only last year that it's been deemed a new interest in the U.S., but for many years, several decades as a matter of fact, the driving style in the touges of Japan combined with circuit drivers accidental drifting turns and corners has been stylized and morphed into the likes of today's D1 Grand Prix. And suddenly now, RWD cars are the hot sellers at online auction sites.