Of course since I’m venturing into a totally new world of tuning in an entirely fresh country to me, I thought I’d pick up the local modified car rag to see how it all differentiates from home. So after leaving the local Indian-run newsagent just below my JB hotel with a copy of Hypertune, I headed back to my modest domicile to see what it was all about.
On first glance the mag looked great; a host of well-tuned Japanese and Euro exotica plastered in a column on the left side of the cover to arouse one’s mind to think about the rest of the juicy contents within. I was particularly looking forward to reading about the stunning white Supra that was set to be one of the magazines features.
But what I didn’t expect to see emblazoned front-and-center on the magazine’s cover was a Hyundai Elantra. Now maybe I could understand if it was some kind of hard-tuned Korean masterpiece that snorted fire with every gearchange and sported an excessively-large turbocharger like some kind of cancerous growth, but this was just a plain silver Elantra. Of course, the photo was representing the new model to come from the Korean manufacturer’s stable, but what kind of modified car mag features a bog-standard Elantra on its front cover?
This brought me to the train of thought that maybe this was a large paid review, set up in some kind of secret golden-handshake meeting between the powers-that-be at Hypertune and Hyundai’s marketing gurus. Maybe. Or maybe I’m just thinking much to deeply into the whole thing.
Craniul-confusing episodes relating to the front cover aside, I was pleasantly surprised as to the general quality of the rest of the magazine. To be brutally honest, some of the actual journalism left a lot to be desired with more grammar and spelling mistakes than a stoned fifth-graders English assessment, however I was easily distraced by this largely due to the quality of the content contained within.
The featured cars were in most ways what I would call beautiful affairs, with not a hint of the usually-ostentatious American-influenced drivel that some of the Australian magazines back home are known to place in their magazines - of course in the interest of keeping the peace I’ll neglect to name them here.
But for me the overall crowning glory of Hypertune was not the articles, featured rides, or even the delectably gorgeous girls that were found swooning over just about every car in the publication (more on this in my next post), for me the most entertaining part of the entire magazine were the ads.
You’re probably thinking something along the lines of, ‘what kind of moron reads a magazine for the advertisements?’, right? Well, give me a chance to explain.
Whenever I was on a quest back home for some kind of part to modify whatever car it was I owned at that point, there always came a time that I’d look to performance magazines like Autosalon, Fast Fours and High Performance Imports because of the slew of products they advertised. Now it’s not to say that these mags didn’t have any ads flogging parts to modify your car, it was just that whatever they were selling were generally sub-standard, locally produced items that could never hold a candle to the Japanese examples they were ripping off.
No matter where you look in Australia, it’s almost impossible to buy Japanese manufactured parts made by well-known Jap tuning houses like Top Secret or Mine’s without going direct to the factory. If you want something like that you generally have to call their Japanese sales office personally, and if you’ve ever tried doing it you’d know that the language barrier makes buying anything from them about as painful as immersing your scrotum into a jar of caustic acid.
Australian distributors of Japanese parts are few and far between and when you do find one, they generally increase the price of whatever they’re selling by about 200%, I guess just because they’re arseholes.
But lo, I was thrown into an utterly-orgasmic world of Japanese tuning parts within four seconds of opening the cover of Hypertune. I must have spent an hour perusing the first few pages of ads, drooling over such things as genuine Spoon carbon items and even complete Tomei SR20 engines. Oh. God. Yes.
We can get items like this at home but the thing here is that these are all readily-available items, sold by local Malaysian distributors. You can get almost anything in an instant, from JUN stroker kits to Bride seats, without having to worry about dealing with an overly-expensive Aussie distributor who makes you wait six months until he has a full container load of stock coming from Japan to make it worth his while.
If it’s always this easy to source wicked JDM tuning parts in Malaysia, I think I might have discovered my automotive Shangri-La.
- Leon.
