Page 66 - Fast Car (March 2020)

HOT RIDE
HO T R ID E
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GOING FOR GOLD

“I’ve been building cars since 2005 – they relect my life and
my passion,” he explains. “My irst build was a Laguna Blue
Honda S2000 with the full Mugen treatment; when things
got rough with the recession I sold my cars and drove an
EG Civic hatchback for three years, but then things turned
around and I was able to have a Nismo 370Z, a 700bhp
Nissan GT-R with an Amuse kit, a TechArt Porsche 997
Turbo… and today all the cars I’ve got are matching in
my own custom shade of gold paint: my RWB Yoshiwara
Porsche 993, my 1985 Corolla AE86 GTS, my Rocket Bunny
240SX with LS1 swap, and now this N3 AE86 SEMA build.”
The regular visits to SEMA speak for themselves – Riko
is a man with an eye for quality; he may be proliic in his
work, but every micron of each project is superbly planned
out and sublimely inished, as you can see from the photos WHAT THE HELL IS A BEAMS ENGINE?
laid out here before you. This AE86 also represents an
interesting twist, as his previous SEMA visits had been Toyota’s S-Series engine is a family of four-cylinder motors used between 1980-2007, and the BEAMS
on RWB Porsche duty rather than actually in the show – name is something that’s become hot property in modding circles of late. Essentially, it’s one of the best
doing rallies, hanging out with hotel valets… but in 2018 production engines ever crafted, in terms of quality and durability. Designed in conjunction with Yamaha and
something changed. “I saw how successful two of my manufactured by Toyota, the name stands for ‘Breakthrough Engine with Advanced Mechanism System’.
friends were displaying their own builds at SEMA, and how Designed from the off to be very light, it features as standard a forged crank, aluminium alloy pistons,
much exposure it got them,” he recalls. “Khyzyl Saleem titanium valves and, in the case of the 5th-gen ‘black-top’ engine you see here, a semi-drive-by-wire
(@thekyza) with his E30 and Scott Girondo (@dunk186) throttle. It is, in short, bloody clever. The black-top was the final and ultimate version of the BEAMS
with his Honda K-swapped Porsche 911 – I wanted some series, and was only officially used in the JDM Altezza RS200 – so, as you can imagine, these are pretty
of that shine. But what to bring? I knew budget would be sought-after engines nowadays.
important, and also the time frame. And at the time I had a
1984 AE86 SR5 shell sitting in my backyard…” an 87bhp single-cam motor rather than the fabled 4A-GE)
Decision made, then. The base-model Corolla would be was originally bought as a parts car for Riko’s Corolla GTS,
reinvented as a show-stopper, using Riko’s unique style to on the grounds that it was cheaper to buy a whole car than
prove to the world that there’s life in the hachi-roku yet. The scratch around for the individual bits. It had been sitting
quality, the fabrication, the creativity, and overall the vision – out in a forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains for the better
this would be an AE86 like no other. part of a decade, and frankly it was a mess; the steering
The SR5 (which is a lowly US-market spec; it came with wheel rubber had been totally eaten away by rats, the stock
interior had been removed and then thrown back in like a
dumpster. When Riko bought it, principally for its straight
body, he parked it in his yard and essentially ignored it for
four years, until this whole project kicked off in February
2019. Amazingly the only part that was rusty was the rear
hatch, which shows what a canny purchase it was in the irst
place, but of course Riko wanted to do this properly. So
there was more than a little remedial work to do.
“The shell was media-blasted, perfected, and treated to
a full rotisserie paint job,” he explains. “I like old cars, but I
don’t like the old wiring, or dealing with hunting for classic
parts. I ind it more reliable to redo everything – still keeping
the soul of the car, but bringing it up to date. And yes, this
did cost a lot to build, but any race car project at this level
will run that bill and much higher; I wanted to show that
there is a level of quality that can be seen in professional
race cars and to do the same with this one – to show
people that you can apply those same principles to these
old Japanese street cars. And I hope it will inspire others to
push for higher quality with their builds.”
Riko was fully hands-on with this project, as with all of his
previous ones; running his own always-on-call commercial
water heater company leaves little spare time, but his role

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