Marv’s Garage: Busted at 197mph on a public motorway

Japanese tuning shops of the 90s and early 00s were legendary places pumping out insane cars and battling them in crazy ways. The mystical 300km/h barrier, or 186mph in the old money, was where many wanted to cement their glory and they wanted to do it on a late-night run on the Wangan freeway, outlaw-style.

Possibly the most famous of the big speed crew is Kazuhiko “Smokey” Nagata, from Top Secret. With a nickname like Smokey you can guess that his gold creations weren’t just riced-up glitterboxes. These things could put the hurt on and often made north of 700rwhp.

In 1998 he took his top speed JZA80 Supra to England to participate in shows put on by the infamous Max Power magazine. And do heaps of skids. However, it was his after-hours activities that made headlines around the world, when Smokey set the Supra to kill and took it down a stretch of the A1 motorway at 4am.

Normally guys looking to run big speeds wouldn’t dare have a crack on a public road at early morning while it’s raining and freezing cold… but Smokey must have nuts the size of Jupiter because he did exactly that.

The famed tuner gassed his 900hp Supra up to an alleged 317km/h (197mph) before the rozzers caught up with him. Smokey was arrested and deported shortly after, but his run stands as a record for the fastest speed anyone has been busted at in the UK. This stunt only added to Smokey’s legend and his Top Secret shop turned out many other killer cars in the years since, including a 2.2-litre 3S-GTE four-cylinder “GT-300” JZA80 Supra and even a twin-turbo 900hp V12 Supra.