Yatabe: Japan's home of top speed madness

The Yatabe Test Track was a place which should be special for all serious Japanese car fans as it hosted some of the most important top-speed events during the JDM tuner era of the '80s and '90s. Located in Tsukuba, in the Ibaraki Prefecture, Yatabe was opened in 1964 as a location for Japanese manufacturers to test their vehicles, with a long high-speed course joined by two infamous banked corners (like a NASCAR speedway).

It originally came to fame when Toyota broke 16 endurance records in their 2000GT supercar there, but it wasn't until the early '80s it truly became an icon. Drag racing had been used the world over to test a car's performance, but tuners in Japan soon wanted bigger thrills and so illegal top-speed competitions took off on public highways.

Highly dangerous and facing an increasing number of fatal crashes, in 1981 the newly-launched Option Magazine hired the Yatabe course to hold a battle royale for top speed bragging rights for domestic and imported vehicles. These competitions have taken place all over the world, and built the legends of the RUF CTR and Callaway Sledgehammer, and Japan was no different.

On that day a Pontiac owned by the TRUST tuning company took the top gong with 264km/h versus 257km/h for SS Kubo's Nissan S30 Fairlady. But the big challenge soon became 300km/h, which was broken in November '81 by the Mitsunaga DeTomaso Pantera that hit 307km/h thanks in part to an engine built by NASCAR legend Mario Rossi.

The domination of imported American and European cars really fired up Japanese tuners and HKS took the honours of becoming Japan's first 300km/h tuner in December 1983 with their twin-turbo Celica M300 XX. Breaking 300km/h (186mph) meant a new goal was in play now, to break 200mph (321km/h). Then 350km/h. And on it went.

Racer, Option co-founder, and all 'round automotive industry legend Daijiro Inada, was one of the men who soon found themselves piloting these extreme machines to speeds few in Japan had experienced outside of hand-built top-tier racing machinery. He argues today that the top speed challenges put on by Option helped drive the thirst for turbo power in Japanese tuning through the 80s and 90s. 

If they were a tuning company around when Yatabe was open, then that company would have built a car to run top-speed or 0-300km/h challenges at Yatabe. Tuners like JUN Auto, Blitz, RE Amemiya, VeilSide, Bomex, HKS, Top Secret, and so many others all soon became household names in our culture thanks to their top-speed battles. 

Danger was ever-present as there was no way to test how safe these cars were at these super-high speeds. By the mid-90s the fastest cars were well over 340km/h and the aerodynamic loads on the suspension and bodywork soon proved to be a sticking point - manufacturers simply didn't engineer their cars for this sort of testing.

This Silvia got loose driving out of a corner and flipped violently along the infield. Thankfully the driver, drifting and racing legend Tarzan Yamada, wasn't killed.

The Yatabe course even inspired one of the most famous tracks in the greatest racing simulator of the '90s: Gran Turismo. The infamous Test Course with its super-long straights and banked turns, with a wooded infield, pays homage to Yatabe and the brave enthusiasts who ran hard there.

So, if it is such a legendary place, why haven't we heard more about it? Option Magazine stopped using the Yatabe facility many years ago after co-founder and Option2 Editor Maisa Sato was killed in a crash there. Today, there is only one small section of the banking left as a memorial to these wild times, as the rest is an industrial park.