Ok - now we’ve got the final 5. The most powerful cars in the game…



The A70 Toyota Supra Twin Turbo



The Nissan 300ZX Fairlady Twin Turbo



The Eunos Cosmo, 20B Rotary powered… Twin Turbo.



The Mitsubishi GTO… Twin Turbo



And finally, the Nissan Skyline R32 GTR…. Twin Turbo aka. GODZILLA. (If you didn’t know what HarperDC was getting at with his posts)


Can you spot a common attribute about these cars that they all share?


Go on… I’ll give you a second…


If you answered, ‘They all have a twin turbo’ - I guess that’s technically correct, but what I wanted to emphasise is this…

…They all have a power output of exactly 280 horsepower.


But that can't be right, can it? There's lots of difference in these cars…


Time to tell a little history lesson, about the Japanese Gentleman’s Agreement…

You see, around this time, the efficiencies in engine design and power were advancing at astronomical rates.

Consumers always wanted the fastest cars with the most power - which was becoming a problem as illegal street racing was very much in vogue, and these cars were getting too powerful for average people to handle. The police were cracking down on street racing and the government was being lobbied to do something about it, because the whole thing was becoming very unsafe.

So the main car manufacturers in Japan, scared of government intervention stopping sales of powerful cars, reached an informal agreement with one another…

No, not to limit the actual power output of their cars… That would be crazy. No, instead they just agreed to limit the power number that they publicly disclose.

Hence why all the cars of the era have a total of ‘280 horsepower’. Many of these cars actually output higher numbers from the factory, and with a simple tune - can go much higher.

A good rule of thumb is looking at their USDM counterparts, who didn’t have to pretend the power output didn’t exist. For example, the 300ZX Fairlady outputs 330 horse power.

The agreement was struck around the late 1980s and lasted all the way til 2005 when a manufacturer finally broke the agreement and everyone had permission to flood the market with real power figures. But sadly, by then the cool JDM bubble era of unique and affordable sports cars was basically over, and consumers were trending towards the boring, every-car-looks-and-feels-the-same-SUV hellscape we live in today.

Ok. Our next step is to make a decision. I'm going to down-select a few of these gentlemen agreement cars, because if we're going to beat the king, we need the most powerful on offer.

Each of these should form a solid basis for Sugar Beet Tuning.