It’s not every day that I get to see an early 1970s Nissan Skyline 2000GT cruising around anywhere. In fact, outside of the SEMA show, it’s akin to having the Lucky Charms guy knock on my door to hand me his pot of gold before flying away on a cereal marshmallow. So when a very clean, gold 1971 example idled past where I had parked Angry Grandpa to cool off at Beech Bend, I had to find the owners, if for no other reason than to thank them for driving a JDM fan’s dream on the street without fear of what may happen. Luckily for me, the owners, Bird and Corinne, not only are gearheads in the truest sense of the word, but had a little shop a bit north of me that they thought I might be interested in.

Here’s their story: Bird DePrez and Corinne Pickett started up Roadtrip Motorcars in 2014 and have based themselves out of Brownsville, Kentucky, a tiny, quiet little community about a half hour north of Bowling Green. Both used to live out in the L.A. area, where they worked in different sections of automotive advertisement filming, and they both share a strong interest in cars, especially Japanese Domestic Market types. Their mode of operation is simple and efficient: they find desirable JDM cars that will sell, do the legwork to get the vehicle into the States, do clean-up and repair work, and sell them…well, most of them. The Skyline doesn’t seem to be for sale and the 1989 Toyota Soarer Aerocabin has a price tag on it that discourages purchase attempts, for reasons we will discuss in an upcoming blog where we feature that car. But they do sell cars, and bring machines in at a small but steady pace. I even got to see the arrival of a new vehicle to the fleet before I left.

I spent half a day at Roadtrip Motorcars, which for eight cars seems like a long time, and for some of these cars, simply being JDM is what makes them unique, while other machines have interesting stories or are cool just because of what they are. We are pocketing a couple of cars for later blogs, but let’s touch on a few now:

1. 1991 Honda Beat

First up is this 660cc, three cylinder kei roadster. Let’s get it out of the way now: this thing is tiny. It’s comparable in size to a Polaris RZR or a golf cart, but that’s a benefit to the Japanese buyer: they get taxed on horsepower, size and oddly enough, age of the vehicle. The older it is, the higher the tax. But don’t think that the Beat is a toy…with styling by Pininfarina that was the last approved by Soichiro Honda before he passed on, a mid-mounted powerplant hooked to a five-speed transaxle, and only 1,600 pounds of weight to cart around, the Beat isn’t a slouch. It isn’t blisteringly quick, but it’ll up and move on with a good pace to it. And if that isn’t enough to be happy with, apparently tuners know how to cram a Honda B-series four-cylinder into them.

2. 1991 Mitsubishi Delica Turbo Diesel 4WD

The only vehicle I had any kind of prior experience with beforehand, the Delica (sold elsewhere as the Space Gear and Star Wagon) is common outside of the U.S. market and is becoming pretty popular in Canada due to it’s rugged build. Yeah, it’s a Japanese box van, but the running gear is Mitsubishi Pajero, the Tri-Diamond’s be-all, do-all SUV. Can you see a mini camper van? Squint a little bit and you’ll start to picture a VW Westfalia that can roll coal. It might be easy to laugh off the idea of an adventure in a Mitsubishi mini-van, but trust us, we’ve seen people who do the whole overlanding gig in these machines. At least this one has dual-zone climate control, and not the optional karaoke machine in the back. Yeah, you read that right…

3. 1991 Nissan Figaro

A decade before the Volkswagen New Beetle and Chrysler PT Cruiser kicked off the retro-design trend, Nissan made waves with what are known as the “Pike Cars”: the Pao, BE-1, S-Cargo and this little machine, the Figaro. They were only made for one year, and if you wanted one, you had to sign up for a lottery for the chance to buy one of the 20,000 produced. Powered by a 987cc four-cylinder and sold only with an automatic, the Figaro might be paying homage to the 1962 Nissan Fairlady, but on visual inspection, we detected more than a little bit of British flavor with this retro-cruiser. Don’t judge the visuals of the Figaro too harshly…buying the cars via auction has drawbacks, and for the Figaro, the drawback was that the person who scored the car’s condition was a bit optimistic. A recent arrival at Roadtrip Motorcars, Bird and Corinne have some work to do to bring the car up to snuff…nothing they can’t handle, of course.

4. 1971 Nissan Skyline 2000GT

Up until now, this has mostly been the funky side of Japanese cars…but this C10 series hakosuka (box Skyline) is more like it. Debuting for 1968 and running until 1972, the C10 chassis is the kind of find that real enthusiasts dream of. Overall, the sensation is of a more capable Datsun 510, and that’s a pretty spot-on view. Underhood is the L20 inline-six found in Nissan and Datsun vehicles from the era. It’s good for 109 horsepower stock. No, it’s not a legit first-generation GT-R, but there might be 500 of those left anywhere in the world and their values are in six-figure territory. Besides, it’s an attention grabber on it’s own…it caught my eye at a dragstrip, didn’t it?

Notice the sticker underneath the right-side tail light lens. That’s the original Nissan-Prince dealership sticker, Pretty cool to see a 46 year old car sporting it’s dealership markings, right? Here’s the really neat part to that sticker: the car has received a full respray, but that sticker was masked off so that it would remain.

That’s part one from our visit! Admittedly, these are the more off-beat, stereotypically Japanese market vehicles, and excepting the Skyline fall into the “weird” category for most people. We do have a couple more stories lined up from our visit, and they will be a bit more BangShifty in nature: turbocharged inline-sixes, a manual transmission swap, and the kind of power that can cause a person to take a step back or two on their criticism of JDM machines. They are also the ones I got some drive time in…