A supercar at every turn
Japanese collector’s garage is like Aladdin’s cave of motorized wonders
Behind us in the tunnel, the angry bulls bellow in pursuit. Foot down, we ride a wave of hissing forced induction, the surge building in the amber half-light as the end approaches. Heat, noise, confinement and the opening road ahead — this is what a .308 slug feels like.
By and large, the Japanese are a conservative people. Like us, their traffic tends to a certain monochromatic conformity: greys, silvers, whites and blacks. If the boxy little cars they favour — an adaptation to limited parking and narrow streets — seem odd to foreign eyes, you only need spend a few days here and it might as well be the usual parade of crossovers at home.
Things are different but essentially the same — and then a sky-blue Lamborghini Diablo SV-R goes hammering past in traffic, roaring in rage and alarm. Hot on its heels is another SV-R, this one bright yellow and similarly furious. These are race-bred bulls, two of just under 30 specially prepped Diablos made for a racing series that saw its inaugural event held just before Le Mans.
They’re even more uncompromising than you’d expect from your average midengined V-12 Italian machine — lighter by some 200 kilos, devoid of creature comforts and fitted with wild aerodynamic enhancements. To stay ahead of them requires something pretty special.
Enter Tomohiro Aono’s twin-boosted Ferrari 512 Berlinetta Boxer. I met Aono through uncovering the facts about the Walter Wolf Countachs — he owned the first red-and-black machine — and he’s offered to be my guide for today.
Our first stop was at a mechanic’s shop inside the Hiroshima city limits. Its proprietor just finished restoring the final Wolf Countach. There are four Lamborghinis on the premises today, including a Murciélago SV and an RG-1.
Aono wants to show me his latest acquisition tucked away in his garage deep in the countryside, so after chatting about 512BB values, Gilles Villeneuve and the trials of owning a Vector W8 and a Jaguar XJ220 — he’s had both — we pile into the boosted 512 and head for the expressway.
While driving a first-gen- eration Mazda Miata around Hiroshima prefecture’s toll roads, I barely even saw a single Porsche 911. It’s a big city, but something of a provincial town — on my last visit here, one of the Mazda execs called it the Saskatoon of Japan.
The exotics are still out there, but you just have to know where to look. Juddering through traffic in the BB, we first lose the Diablos and then blast past them, slipping through the gates at the toll entrance to take the lead.
The 512 is a pretty interesting machine, unlike anything you’d likely see outside of Japan. Aono has owned it for 35 years, building it into the high-speed machine it is today. Doing so was tricky, as the car represents a mix of European and Japanese tuning parts.
With radiators mounted up front and tiny side windows, it’s hot but not uncomfortable in the BB’s cabin. What’s surprising is how loud the Diablos are in the tunnel: Despite the fact that we’re surging ahead of them with around 650 horsepower of blown flat-12 violence, you can still hear their metallic V-12s howling to keep up.
As our exit comes up, Aono moves over to the left and the sky-blue car snaps off a quick rev-matched down-shift as a salute.
“That means goodbye,” Aono explains, and then the two Lamborghinis stampede off to the north, headed who knows where.
We slow, roll through a couple of small rural townsites and cross a bridge over a wide, smoothly running river. A nondescript building is just up ahead on the left and we roll up. Heat emanates off the Ferrari, mixed with the scent of hot engine oil and the reek of gasoline. The exhaust pings and ticks as it cools.
Aono rolls up the shutters on his Aladdin’s cave of motorized wonders and hits the lights. There’s a prototype Gumpert Apollo, powered by a twin-turbocharged 4.2-litre Audi V-8. There’s a Motegituned Porsche 911 Turbo. There’s a 1,000-horsepower JUN Nissan 300ZX, a twin to the record-holding high-speed car.
His latest pride and joy is a Lamborghini Murciélago R-GT. Also built for racing, the R-GT features carbon-fibre intensive construction and rear drive only. Just nine were built, and it’s very much a racing car: roll cage, sequential gearbox, limited room for the driver and complicated switch gear.
But there’s trouble. It would appear that the R-GT’s drysump oil reservoir has been over-filled, so while that’s fussed over, some of Aono’s friends arrive. One is a very talented painter, and he shows me a portfolio featuring everything from Steve McQueen’s Porsche 917K from Le Mans to a first-generation Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.
I take a wander around Aono’s garage, noting the Brabus Mercedes-Benz convertible tucked in one corner and peering at framed photos on the wall. There’s Walter Wolf, of course, Gian Paolo Dallara and all the rest. There’s a picture of his ex-Le Mans Jaguar XJ220, another car he ran regularly on the street.
The verdict is in: the R-GT can run. I fold myself into the passenger’s seat, fasten the harness and angle my head so it doesn’t bounce off the support for the roll cage. Aono smiles apologetically as he places on a pair of ear protectors. “Just for the driver,” he says. Sweet fancy Moses. Between the whine and the whack of the sequential gearbox, the howling berserker rage of the V-12 and the racketing pelting of debris flinging off the slick tires, it’s like being in a dentist’s chair on board a German U-boat while it’s being depth-charged.
Bang! Fourth. Bang! Fifth. A tunnel — howling and keening, the Lamborghini surges ahead relentlessly with otherworldly fury. This thing makes the Batmobile look like a Prius.
Somehow, I survive the ride with dry underpants and the greater percentage of my hearing intact. We tuck the beast away under cloth and blanket, pull the tuned 911 Turbo out and start making the long drive home. For a while, we chase a previous generation V-10-powered BMW M6.
At lunch, in a quiet garden restaurant beside a river in which cormorants fish lazily, Aono muses idly on the craziness of his automotive passion.
“We try to be good,” he grins. “But the right foot …”
He mimes it going flat. I’ll say — and then some!