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This California rally is vintage Japanese car heaven

What's so good about the future? This is what I was thinking when some folks at Mazda invited me and a handful of other journalists to join them on the second-annual Touge California. It's a rally for classic Japanese cars that covers a huge chunk of Southern California's twistier roads, where fans get to test their beloved machines. Oh, and it attracts swarms of admirers with cameras. "It is not a race. It is a vintage touring rally," said Ben Hsu, editor in chief of Japanese Nostalgic Car, and one of the coordinators of the event. "In Japan, touge most definitely refers to racing, whether timed, in touge battles, or drifting antics. Touge California was created to give drivers of Japanese classics a taste, as close as possible, of the types of roads their cars were forged on." Touge California was created to give drivers of Japanese classics a taste, as close as possible, of the types of roads their cars were forged on. We started the day on a mundane stop-and-go freeway drive from Mazda's Irvine headquarters to Escondido, me riding shotgun with my journalist co-driver in a 2016 Miata. But Mazda also brought along three heritage products on this trip – a 1985 RX-7 GSL-SE, a 1978 GLC three-door hatchback, and a 1975 REPU (rotary engined pickup) – serving as reminders of the company's history in the U.S. The group of Mazdas was joined in Escondido by many more Mazdas. And Toyotas, Hondas, Datsuns – so many 240Zs – and the odd Subaru and Mitsubishi. In total, 28 cars were at the start line. "We doubled the field this year, and made the route longer – 200 versus 120 miles," Hsu said. "We separated the cars into two run groups based on speed and a mix of makes and models." I spent the first part of the rally in the Mazda pickup to get a taste of rotary power. It was my first experience behind the wheel of a Wankel-powered vehicle, my first time driving a small Japanese truck from the '70s, and my God that thing has a lot of power. I had a few scares when I had to stand on the brakes, and I found the shift throw's immense length disconcerting – it felt like third gear engaged somewhere in front of the dashboard, with fourth somewhere in the bed. The truck was a great introduction to the rotary, however, and to '70s Japanese cars. Especially in Southern California, old Japanese cars aren't as novel to casual observers as they might be in other parts of the country.

2014 Mazda6: July/August 2013

Our newest long-termer - the Soul Red 2014 Mazda6 seen here - arrived in my driveway at the end of June. Without hesitation, I immediately put it to work as a daily driver, carpool bus and family vacation sled, and it accomplished all of those tasks with aplomb. Now, more than 4,000 miles down the road, I am left convinced that Mazda's latest midsize sedan is one of the best in its segment.
During the past 60 days, I have subjected the Mazda6 to scorching travel across Southwestern deserts, wheezing climbs over 8,000-foot-high Sierra Nevada mountain passes and basking in the cool ocean breezes of Malibu. It traveled with four passengers and a full load of luggage from Los Angeles to Lake Tahoe, and it braved the bumper-to-bumper freeway congestion on a weekday trip down to San Diego. It accomplished everything that was asked of while hardly skipping a beat - it has only required a regular sip of unleaded fuel to keep it moving forward.

Junkyard Gem: 1988 Mazda 323 GTX

Back in early 2007, when the late Davey G. Johnson got me my first job writing for an automotive publication (well, unless you count writing for the Year One catalogs back in the mid-1990s) and I took on this goofy pen name for real, I didn't quite grasp that any readers might be interested in the stuff I saw during my frequent junkyard trips. So, when I took my crappy Nikon Coolpix 2500 to the now-defunct Pick Your Part in Hayward, California, and saw a super-rare Mazda 323 GTX among all the Tercels and Rabbits in the IMPORTS section, I just took a few shots of this interesting car for my own enjoyment. These days, I'll take more than 100 photographs of a junkyard car of such great historical significance, editing them down to the best couple of dozen, but in March of 2007 I got just three of the 323 GTX. Robert Capa had his Magnificent Eleven at D-Day, and I've got the Magnificent Three of the GTX. Here they are. Any Mazda 323 of the immediate post-GLC era is a real junkyard rarity today, but Mazda sold very few of the all-wheel-drive, turbocharged homologation-special 323s over here during the 1988 and 1989 model years. A mere 1,243 of these cars made it to North American streets. Back in 2007, they weren't worth much (in fact, they still aren't incredibly valuable, if we go by Bring a Trailer real-world sale prices), and so this one showed up in El Pulpo's yard. These cars wouldn't be considered particularly fast by 21st-century standards, now that we've had decades of street-legal Mitsubishi Lancer Evos and Subaru WRXs flinging snow and mud around, and they tended to grind their powertrain components into a costly oil-and-metal-shaving slurry. But they were maniacally cool in the late 1980s, and that's enough. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. "Even with the sun and heavy rain, I made it here faster with my car!"