By Colin Wood
Aug 7, 2020
Yesterday, August 6, was 86 Day, an informal holiday that celebrates Toyota's venerable AE86 Corolla (and, by extension, the FR-S, BRZ and GT 86).
So, we couldn't think of a better way to celebrate than to watch an AE86 doing what it does best: quick driving and fasting sliding at the hands of the Drift King himself, Keiichi Tsuchiya.
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8/7/20 2:53 p.m.
And this was posted to YouTube today. Very cool. Tsuchiya + AE86 = perfection.
8/7/20 2:58 p.m.
And what's with 3.5th gear?
8/8/20 11:25 p.m.
About the 3.5 gear: when you start really chasing the sharp end of performance with these cars, the gear ratios are too wide, with the 3-4 as the most egregious huge jump. At one point in time, the best solution was to shell out a bunch of $$ for a close-ratio gear set which put 1st about as tall as the stock 2nd gear used to be, left 4th as 1:1, and brought everything else closer. Because these cars often can't pull redline in 5th, and even they can, they are rarely used in scenarios where they need to, when fitting the close-ratio gears you would also swap the 4.3 final drive for a 4.77 or a 5.3, and everything was just dandy on the track or in the twisties. It made sense to spend several thousand on these mods on a newish car, or a dedicated race car when these cars were fairly new.
Fast forward a few years and the close-ratio gearsets are discontinued, NLA, and going up in price while the price of the cars wasn't. It no longer made sense to spend $3-5k on gearing for what was then a $3-5k car. TRD made a cheaper (and more readily availble) 1-2 gear set that raised just 1st and 2nd a bit, which helped, but left the nasty 3-4 change with a huge rev drop. You can't go mucking around with the 1:1 4th without redesigning the entire transmission, but you can replace the largely useless (for track work) 5th with a ratio between 3rd and 4th. An added bonus is that this setup can work well overall with the stock 4.3 or a junkyard Toyota van 4.5 final drive, saving the money one would spend on an aftermarket or TRD 4.7 or 5.3 final drive. The shifting pattern must take some getting used to, though!
8/9/20 7:44 a.m.
...I would have thought it would be June 8th, unless Japan follows the American oddity of putting the month before the date?
8/9/20 8:54 p.m.
I love the 3.5 gear!
8/9/20 11:22 p.m.
And everyone's seen this, right? I still have it on DVD.
8/10/20 11:06 a.m.
I like the 3.5 gear idea. I'd almost consider looking at that for the 5 spd in the TDI, except the nasty jump is between 2 & 3. Somehow I don't think a 1-2-5-3-4 sequence would be ideal... although when I sit here and go through the pattern, maybe it could work... Hmm...
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