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Japanese classic cars

You’re the one that I want – 1973 Datsun 240K GT

21 February, 2025

In the early 1970s, Clark Caldow was a young sales rep travelling the North Island and doing big miles annually. He loved driving. In 1975 the firm he worked for asked Clark what he wanted for his new car, and Clark chose a brand-new Datsun 240K GT. The two-door car arrived, and Clark was smitten, or in his own words, he was “pole vaulting.”
Clark drove it all over the country, racking up thousands of miles. “It had quite a bit of pep with its SOHC 128 hp (96kW) of power mated to a four-speed manual gearbox,” he says. Weighing in at 1240kg meant the power to weight ratio was good for the time and its length at almost 4.5 metres meant it had good street presence.
Clark has been a car enthusiast all his life, and decided around nine years ago to look for one of these coupes. By sheer luck he very quickly found a mint example refurbished by an aircraft engineer, but it was in Perth.

Saltwater Creek Garage

13 June, 2024

After passing by this building for many years, I decided to call in and ask the owner about his garage and the car that had been parked there. It was a 1982 Hyundai Pony 1200 TLS that he’d inherited from his mother who had bought it when it was nearly new. I was fortunate enough to buy it from him — many had approached him over the years but were turned away. After sitting out there for that long you could not imagine how dirty it was. At least it had never been wet in all that time. The interior is a mid-blue and almost like new — in fact his mother, Irene, had still retained the original factory-fitted thick clear-plastic cover over the mid-blue vinyl door panels.

A Giugiaro great

1 February, 2024

Giugiaro himself — the man who created the Ferrari 250 GT — was pleased with the design that Isuzu had commissioned to be based on a GM Chevette platform. His design, called the Asso di Fiori (Ace of Clubs), was unveiled at the 1979 Tokyo Motor Show to rave reviews. Isuzu fast-tracked it into production.
Carrying the nose forward to refine it just a touch more shows the respect Isuzu had for its lines. It meant engineering in some mechanics to flip up little eyebrows in the bonnet lip to expose more of the lamp glass in this pre high intensity light bulb era. You can imagine most car makers would go, “No, cut it off there”. If Isuzu had, it would certainly have been a less characterful design.
I can remember seeing one or two of them when they were new in the ’80s and feeling a fondness for the car, and for the company that had produced such a clean and restrained design.