(car engine revs)
- What do you do if you want more power
than anything than you can buy at the dealership?
Well, if you're these guys,
you invent after market tuning, of course.
From bolt-on turbo kits for Skylines in the '70s
to full carbon fiber Altezzas
that I had on a poster on my wall in high school,
the original JDM more power, baby, company.
(car engine revs)
Oh, I love the smell of a power, baby, in the morning.
This is everything you need to know
to get up to speed on HKS.
(thunderclaps)
(air whooshes)
Big old thanks to Keeps for sponsoring this episode.
I know right now I've got these luscious, luscious locks
but for some dudes my age that's not always the case.
In fact, two out of three of you guys watching
will have some sort of male pattern baldness
by the time you are 35.
But good news: Keeps makes it easy to prevent hair loss.
You don't even have to go to a freakin' doctor anymore,
thanks to Keeps you can visit the doctor online
and get hair loss medication
delivered right to your freakin' door.
And if you're ready to take action
and prevent hair loss, go to keeps.com/uptospeed50
or click the link in the description below
to receive 50% off your first order.
That's K-E-E-P-S.com/uptospeed50.
Today we're gonna find out why these three letters
are on more sick race cars
and project builds than any other tuner,
how they basically invented after market tuning,
and meet the legend responsible for it all.
Chapter one: Fuji milk.
HKS headquarters sits at the base of Mount Fuji
and that's where they've lived
ever since they started operations in 1973.
The story starts with a young man
by the name of Hiroyuki Hasegawa.
Now, Hiroyuki was working for Yamaha
as an engineer in the early 1970s when he was like,
"I freakin' love race cars
"and I love engines
"and they make pretty good stuff here at Yamaha
"but I'm pretty sure that I can make a better engine
"if I just freakin' do it myself."
And so, Hiroyuki left Yamaha
and teamed up with his good friend,
Goichi Kitagawa, to do just that.
They were able to secure some funding
from a company called Sigma Automotive
and thus, HKS was formed.
H for Hasegawa, K for Kitagawa and S for Sigma.
They bought an old milk shed on the base of Mount Fuji
and set up shop.
How friggin' cool is that?
That's literally Nolan's cream dream.
HKS had an innovative idea:
build high-performance after market engines
and engine parts that weren't offered
by the original manufacturer.
But they didn't wanna just make a fast engine.
Hiroyuki's end goal was to make
the number one racing engine in the entire world.
If HKS could pull it off,
they could make a name for themselves
and maybe even change the world of racing.
Building an engine from the ground up is expensive.
They didn't have enough funding to put it into production,
so they started developing the next best thing: a turbo.
Chapter two: the birth of the turbo era.
In July of 1974,
just under a year after the company was established,
the first HKS after market turbo came out, the FET.
The FET.
This whooshy boy was made specifically
for the Nissan L20 engine
in a little car called the Kenmeri Skyline.
If you're a fan of the Skyline,
check out the two episodes of Up To Speed
that we made about it.
I'll put a link in the description below.
I cried at the end.
Hit that subscription button and the notification bell
for your chance to see me weep.
Anyway, ever since the Skyline debuted
it was a favorite tuning car for young car enthusiasts
and now they could easily install this kit
but significantly, significantly bumped up.
Power, baby!
(car engine revs)
A stock Kenmeri Skyline made 114 horsepowers
but with the HKS kit on it
the engine made 158 buff horsepowers.
That's an increase of 40%.
A 40% increase in power from one after market part nowadays
is relatively unthinkable.
HKS's timing couldn't have been any better.
The company debuted their first turbo kit
just as the gas crisis was starting to wane.
In other parts of the world big cars with big engines
were suffering due to environmental restrictions.
Car owners were looking for a way to get more power, baby,
from smaller engines,
and the world's first after market turbo charger kit
for a passenger car was a huge success.
But like most great engineers,
Hiroyuki and Goichi saw room for improvement
and they looked to an unlikely source for inspiration.
It was actually American manufacturers
who were the first to put turbos in production vehicles.
The Chevy Corvair Monza
and the Oldsmobile Jetfire.
Our boys over at HKS got their milky little hands
on one of these American-made turbos
and took it apart.
They used it as a model for their next two releases,
turbo kits for Celica's 18 RG engine
and an upgraded version for the L20 in the Skyline.
When these kits came out in 1977,
HKS was known as the bolt-on turbo charger brand
and their reputation was growing, boy!
In 1981 HKS USA was established.
Now, who says we don't get any of the cool stuff?
Uh, you do in literally almost every frickin' video.
I don't say it all the time.
I'm just saying, you are literally the guy
who says we don't get any cool stuff.
No, I don't.
There's a video every day on Donut
and I'd be surprised if they don't mention it
in every single video,
it's kinda a tenet of the company.
Dude, shut up.
You made a whole episode on the dealers about it.
Yeah, okay, I guess I did do that.
Maybe this would be a better conversation for offline.
You have a video to do.
At the start of the 1980s,
things like fuel injection
and other electronically controlled technologies
started becoming mainstream.
Now, HKS saw the way the industry was moving
and developed electronic control devices.
Some of the most popular devices they made
were the turbo timer
to keep your oil from ruining your turbo
and the electronic valve control.
Now the tuning market is a bajillion dollar industry
but back then, this stuff was brand spanking new.
Now, HKS clearly understand the place
they now occupied in the after market,
and like any good business, they capitalized on it.
But they never forgot what they had initial D (chime)
set out to do:
build the best race engine in the world.
Chapter three: keep it 300, baby.
A brand new scene was forming in Japan in the early '80s.
Illicit, high speed-runs were all the rage,
we cover a lot of it in our episode of Past Gas podcast
on the Midnight Club.
All the tuning shops in Japan were battling
to be first team to hit 300 kilometers per hour.
Speed-running was incredibly dangerous.
As Daijiro Inada, a speed-run driver
that would later go on to start Option magazine said,
"I was risking my life while the people told me that
"the car isn't fast
"because Dai is scared to hit the gas pedal.
"In reality, I was on the gas like I had a death wish."
Cool!
What a cool freakin' quote.
He's super bad (beep)
and I'm pretty sure that they didn't
let him in the Midnight Club.
The first tuner to breach the 300 KPH barrier was ABR,
short for Air Breathing Research
ABR hit 307.69
in their highly-modified De Tomaso Pantera
at the Yatabe High Speed Testing Circuit in 1981.
Now, although this was a great achievement,
and it was made possible by Japanese tuners,
it wasn't a Japanese car.
The record for breaking 300 in a JDM car
was still up for grabs.
So, HKS threw their hat into the ring
and began developing a highly-modified,
Celica XX called the M300.
HKS tuned the 5 MG engine in the Celica XX,
which outside of Japan was known as the,
is it Surpa?
Supra!
Super, Super.
Supra.
Super--
It's frickin' Supra!
Supra, Supra!
Do, do, do, do, do, do, do.
Supra, Supra!
Supra.
Ah, frickin' finally, I thought he was never gonna get it!
So that means, in addition to being
one of the first Skyline tuners,
HKS can add original Supra tuner to their resume.
Are you guys starting to understand
why their sticker is so frickin' famous?
They stripped weight off the body of the Celica,
dropped two HKS spinny boys in it,
added a triple carb
and some of their control units into the mix.
The exact specs of this car are lost to history
but the point is HKS tuned the ever-loving heck out of it.
By the time they finished,
the M300 was putting out
600 seriously yoked Japanese horses.
Introducing the Donut Media buff horses official T-shirt.
Guys, I'm so excited about this little piece of kit
because this thing was developed on this show,
supported by you guys,
and now it's on a frickin' shirt.
I asked you guys to comment "buff horses"
in the comment section
enough times to make Jesse,
so that Jesse couldn't say no to making a shirt,
and you know what, guys?
We did it.
Make sure that you get your buff horses shirt
so you can celebrate your milestone.
We did this together, thank you so much.
(beeps)
And on a cold day in February 1983,
the driver of the highly-tuned Celica ripped around the oval
until he maxed out at a blistering 301.25 kmh.
Finally a Japanese car had broken the 300 kmh barrier.
For any other tuning company,
this might've been a crowning achievement,
but for HKS, they were just getting started!
Chapter four: Hiro dreams of soup speed.
1984 was a banner year for Hiroyuki Hasegawa and HKS.
That year, after more than a decade
in the business of making after market turbos,
Hasegawa was about to realize his original dream
of making a race engine.
Enter the HKS 134 E.
This purpose built motor for rally
and drag racing was completely fabricated by HKS,
aside from the Mitsubishi-sourced G54B engine block,
which could be found in anything from
the Mitsubishi Starion
to everyone's favorite car, the Plymouth Fire Arrow.
This little bad boy four banger
made 276 (speaks in foreign language)
(horse neighs)
That means "muscular horses" in Japan.
(chuckles)
And that's without a frickin' turbo,
and that's in 1984.
This was at a time when the C4 Corvette
was making 205 horsepowers with an engine twice the size.
HKS was commissioned by Ralli Art
to put this motor in a Mitsubishi Starion
for Group B rally racing in 1985.
But there was an itty bitty, little teeny bit of a problem.
The most dominant cars in Group B were all wheel drive.
The Starion would need to be converted
from rear wheel drive to all wheel drive
if they ever wanted to stand a chance
against these two powerhouse pony boys.
So Hasegawa ripped the transfer case out of a Pajero
and threw it in a Starion.
For better weight distribution,
the engine was moved to the rear,
and the result was the HKS Starion D404.
But sadly, or probably for the best,
Group B was canceled
before the HKS Starion could race a full season.
But you can still find some of these engines in the wild
ripping up the drag strip.
There's one driven by Felix Vega
that can do low sevens
and hit 191 miles per hour in the quarter.
(car engine revs)
Chapter five: on a roll.
From the late '80s throughout the '90s,
HKS really hit their stride.
In 1990 they built an 826 horsepower twin turbo Supra
for the drag strip
that later ran a 7.91 quarter mile.
It was another first for the company.
Being the first sub eight second street car in the world.
HKS developed and tested a V12 engine for F1
that made 670 buff horses on pump gas,
and revved up to 13,000 RPMs,
but it never raced.
Just the thought of a tuning company entering Formula One
was considered laughable at the time,
but HKS was definitely accomplished enough
to roll with the big dogs.
In 1991 HKS completed one of the boldest projects
since Gatorade came out with (mumbles).
They were like, "I'm gonna modify a R32 Skyline."
And common sense was like, (gentle chimes),
"No, it's such a good car,
"you can't completely gut the perfect thing.
"There's no way you can make it any better."
The boys at HKS took a Nissan R32 Skyline
and built a new car from the ground up.
This time choosing to focus on two things:
high power and durability.
Those seem like pretty good things to focus on.
No box was left unchecked.
They upgraded the stock turbos
to a Twin Power HKS GT turbo system,
installed an HKS V Cam system with variable valve control,
and the GT Sports Turbine Kit could be adjusted
to squeeze out 591 buff horse (mumbles) from the RB26.
They say don't ruin a good thing
but what if you ruin a good thing
by making it a better thing?
Is that even still considered ruining it?
I don't know, hit me up in the God dang comments!
Either way, the result was the Zero R.
It was the first full car HKS had built from the ground up
and it's truly one of the sickest cars to ever exist.
The Zero R proved to be too expensive
to justify producing large numbers of
but Nissan did make 10 of 'em,
of which only four are still around.
I imagine they all got frickin' wrapped around poles.
Now, you can't talk about HKS
and not talk about their involvement
with Japanese touring car racing.
JTTC was the pinnacle for racing at the time in Japan
and they had very strict guidelines.
Many parts were standardized across the board for all teams
but HKS was the only team
that built their own frickin' engine.
R32s dominated Group A racing,
not just in Japan but in other countries like Australia,
where the Calsonic R32 first garnered the Godzilla nickname
because a bunch of Australian press guys
were a little bit racist
and not super happy about this Japanese car
beating up on all their big V8 dudes.
So Skylines were dominating JTTC
and HKS's car was on of the best.
I mean, this livery
is one of the most iconic liveries of all time.
The green, purple and red on that black body.
Green headlights.
This car is probably the first time
most of us saw the HKS logo.
It competed for two years in JTTC,
took one poll position
and took first at Sugo Racing Circuit in 1993.
HKS was also involved in Time Attack.
In 1995 an HKS-built R33
broke the lap record at Tsukuba
with a time of 58.17 seconds.
In the early 2000s they took a Toyota Altezza,
what we got as the IS300, tuned it,
and broke the record at Tsukuba again
with a time of 55.06.
HKS came back in 2006 with their tuned Evo 8,
the CT 230 R,
one of the fastest Japanese cars ever built.
That's 552 horsepower
and 470 torques in a dang Lancer.
With all these different types of racing
that HKS has been involved with,
it's important that we don't forget drifting,
which I think is technically not racing, but a motor sport.
HKS entered D1 competition in 2002 with their Altezzas
and the S15 Hyper Silvia nicknamed Turbee,
for the bee logo on the side.
HKS is revered as one of the best in drifting,
a sport that places a lot of value
on performance and reliability,
which is kinda exactly
what is the main tenet of their company.
HKS has never restricted themselves to one make,
one class, or even four wheels.
In 2016 Hiroyuki Hasegawa, the legend,
passed away at the age of 71.
He loved everything that went fast
and will forever be remembered
as a pioneer of after market Japanese tuning.
His influence transcends any one type of motor sport,
car scene or enthusiast.
I think I speak for every buddy who loves these things
when I say thank you.
Thank you, guys, so much for watching
this episode of Up To Speed,
and supporting Donut.
I say it all the time
but I can't believe that this is my job
and I get to just talk about really cool cars
with you guys every week.
If you wanna check out a video that we made
on another legendary Japanese tuning company,
check out this episode of Up To Speed on Spoon.
We got more power, baby sticker packs available
at the store right now.
Get yourself some at donutmedia.com,
follow me in Instagram @jamespumphrey.
I love you.