Man has a love for old Toyotas

WEST NYACK, N. Y. — Luis Bonilla was inching his brown 1982 Toyota Corolla from a tight parking space outside the Clarksville Inn when something caught his eye. As he watched his mirrors for traffic approaching on Strawtown Road here, a Corolla nearly identical to his, but with shinier paint, drove by.

“I don’t believe it — two of them together,” said the 41-year-old father of two, his voice betraying a level of excitement people rarely display for 30- year- old econocars. But Bonilla is enthusiastic about his hobby, customizing and racing rear-drive Toyotas built until the mid-1980s.

He followed the Corolla, two cars ahead in traffic, as it turned east onto Route 59. At the next stoplight he admired its well-preserved condition and snapped photos with his phone. The driver, an older man, never seemed to notice.

“It’s an ’83,” Bonilla said, explaining that the color was offered on Corollas for just that one year.

Aside from its color, a Champagne- like shade called Shell Metallic, the car looked identical to Bonilla’s 1982 four-door sedan. A daily- driver with 170,000 miles that he bought two years ago, it is one of his family’s seven Toyotas.

Bonilla’s zeal for such an unremarkable model might puzzle car enthusiasts who look down on Corollas of any vintage as prosaic. His devotion to Toyotas, he says, is rooted in their reliability and the ease of modifying them for much more power and performance.

“They’re also part of my heritage,” he said, referring to the popularity of Toyotas — and people racing them— in Puerto Rico, where he was born. His family left the island in 1979, when he was 7.

Bonilla said he inherited his love of cars from his father, who did body repair work, and his uncle, who always drove an older Cadillac and still drives a 1980 Toyota Corolla in Puerto Rico. “I just shipped him a dashboard,” he said. Bonilla’s family lived half a mile from a dragstrip, where, he said, there was an active Toyota racing scene. His mother, concerned about safety, would not allow him to go to the track, but he remembers when the motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel came to do one of his famous stunts.

“I climbed a tree outside the track to watch,” he said.

Bonilla, who now lives in Stratford, Conn., and drives a tractor-trailer for a living, took up his Toyota hobby as a teenager.

Like aBMWor Porsche buff, Bonilla refers to his Toyotas by the manufacturer’s internal codes rather than their familiar model names. His favorite Toyota, the ’70s Celica coupe, is known as an RA21, and the 1969 Corona coupe belonging to his 21-year-old son, Luis Jr., is an RT43.

Bonilla said that in the 1990s he and his friends encountered anti-Toyota prejudice at car shows, where their efforts were ignored.

“No matter how good our workmanship, we could not get respect or awards,” he said. “They were never going to give a ‘best paint’ trophy to a Toyota over a Chevelle.”

His response was to start the Old School Toyota Car Club of Bridgeport in 2000. Its 11 members, many from nearby towns in Connecticut, own 25 cars among them.

Ten years ago, Bonilla began organizing his own shows. Although skewed to older Japanese models, the events welcomed all entries, including American muscle cars like his neighbor’s 1969 Chevelle SS396.

“My shows offered a new playing field,” he said. “At the first one, we had 32 cars. At our tenth and final show this year, we had 330.”

This year, Bonilla organized his club’s first drag racing track day, renting Lebanon Valley Dragway near Albany, N.Y., on a weekday in May.

“It was a family event,” he said. “The guys brought their wives and kids, and we grilled.”