Back in the days when I was a sound recordist, I used to do a lot of car-related jobs, some of them for corporate clients and some for proper TV. I actually managed to get myself sacked (or rather, found myself in a position where they definitely weren’t going to hire me again) from Top Gear, which I suppose was a shame, but one programme on which I regularly worked was Driven, which was basically the Channel 4 version (/rip-off) of Top Gear.
The most sought-after Driven shoots were car launches, for which a manufacturer would foot the bill for all sorts of journalists and TV crews to test a new car and stay in very nice hotels into the bargain, often overseas. The more usual ones were called ‘punter pieces’ and involved ordinary Joes and Josephines, not to mention far less salubrious locations and hotels.
For one of these, myself and a camera crew drove to a drag racing strip somewhere in the Midlands, and there met a group of lads who were going to compare a selection of cars with similar specs. These particular punters had been recruited via the now defunct but somewhat legendary magazine Max Power, which was aimed squarely at boy racers and contained features about souped up motors, the photos of which often featured scantily clad babes draped over the bonnet.
I was interested to learn that rather than souping up already cool-looking cars, a typical Max Power reader preferred to use thoroughly nondescript models, I suppose because they’re more of a challenge and present a greater before-and-after contrast. After we had finished shooting the footage for the show, the lads insisted on showing off their prides and joys, and one of them handed me a home video camera before sitting me in the passenger seat of his own. I was keen to give him a decent memento of the day and as we sped away, I just about managed to point the camera through the windscreen at the track in front of us. But after a few seconds, he turned to me with a sly grin (maybe even a wink – I can’t remember clearly) and pressed a colorful looking button that was attached somewhere below the dashboard. This, as it turned out, was connected to a canister of nitrous oxide, and caused the car to suddenly double its rate of acceleration (or so it seemed). As a result, I was thrown backwards into the seat and the camera almost flew from my hands altogether, thus ruining his home video.
But anyway, quite unexpectedly, the other day I saw a Max Power-related story on Japanese TV, about a man called ‘Smokey’ Nagata.
Nagata was born in a sleepy farming town in Hokkaido, and as anyone who’s ever lived in the countryside knows, easily the most popular hobby for men between their late teens and early…well, sixties, I should think, is driving and tinkering with cars. To cut a long story short, after various different apprenticeships and apprentice-like experiences, Nagata opened his own car shop in Tokyo that specialized in upgrading cars (in this case, usually cars that were already pretty cool as opposed to nondescript) to travel at quite eye-popping speeds.
As you might expect, he was very much into wheel spins, burn outs (I assume this is how he acquired his nickname, although it may be a reference to his equivalent passion for chain smoking), and drag racing-style sudden acceleration. In October 1998, he was invited by Max Power to exhibit one of his cars at a motor show in the UK. He had to return home partway through the trip to take part in the Japanese drag racing season, but was in the UK again in November, when a plan was made to film him in action in his gold-painted Toyota Supra. (Among other things, this was fitted with something called a ‘ball bearing turbocharger,’ which somehow manages to sound super high-tech and iron-age primitive at the same time.)
The chosen location was a particularly wide, flat, and straight stretch of the A1 (M) a couple of hours north of London. I once drove the same stretch myself in the first car I ever owned, a very modest and frankly ugly second-hand Vauxhall Nova, and squeezed out of it what was probably the highest speed it had ever managed. Nagata, though, was in another league entirely.
The filming continued for two hours, and at one point, he reached a staggering 317 km/h (197 mph) – not that it’s possible to prove, but this was (and still is?) allegedly the fastest speed ever attained on a public road in the UK. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that it took so long for the local police to realise what was going on, even though it was about 4 a.m. when they finally turned up. From the various versions of the story that I read in both Japanese and English, I couldn’t quite work out the details, but it would seem that Nagata was nabbed for driving at more like 200 km/h (about 125 mph), although the record-breaking run had of course been captured as video evidence.
Nagata spent the morning in police cell, and was eventually assigned an interpreter and a lawyer. The magistrates’ court hearing took place that afternoon, and incredibly, he got off with a fine, a revoked international driver’s licence, and a ten-year ban – not from driving but from re-entering the UK. His defence was something along the lines of, ‘I happened to accelerate to a high speed, there happened to be a cameraman there, and there also happened to be cameras attached to the car.’ In other words, he wasn’t showing off with a crazy stunt, just minding his own business with his foot pressed ever-so-slightly too hard on the accelerator and some witnesses with a coincidental interest in pimped rides.
I can only think the judge must have been a Max Power reader and/or Smokey Nagata fan, but either way, rather than ending up with a prison sentence, Nagata returned to Japan a day or two later, and once the story and video footage emerged, became a celebrity among petrolheads worldwide and found his car shop busier than ever, often with customers who had traveled to Japan from overseas.
As a final note, I would just like to say that I am very much against high-speed or dangerous driving on public roads – in fact, I plan to write another post in the near future on that very topic – and feel much less morally conflicted about Nagata’s various record attempts and super-fast driving on proper race tracks, but if you want to know more about him, this Top Gear magazine article and its accompanying photos are very good and this article in Japanese provides a more in-depth account of the A1 (M) incident. Actually, the subtitles in the below video are almost identical to the article and machine translated into fairly respectable English, while the video below it is the original TV piece on Nagata and his somewhat ill-fated but certainly infamous visit to the UK.
