His preferred painter, Mauricio Rosales, runs a shop 20 miles away. But I love the mechanical action of a carburetor, the idea that if you want to throw on a cam and a header, you don’t have to bring out a laptop or change injectors. It’s easy to restomod cars with fuel injection. My problem was that I was getting cars that had not one carburetor but three of them. “As far as I was concerned, the carburetor was just a little magic box. “I was born and raised on fuel injection,” he says.

When Bizek opened his shop, he faced a steep learning curve. We found that there’s really no way to import these cars without having the ability to maintain and restore them.” We had to spend months going through the electrical, the carburetors, the fuel system, repairing all the rust, fixing all the chassis problems. It’s not just as easy as buying a car, washing it, and selling it. “But Japan is a very humid, rainy, sometimes snowy environment, and cars from the late Sixties and early Seventies have thin steel unibodies. “I honestly didn’t plan on getting into restoration,” Bizek says. These cars were cheap and widely available in Japan, so Cobb and Bizek began importing them for resale in the States, starting with a 1972 Skyline four-door sedan. He later worked as a fabricator, then in research and development for import specialist Cobb Tuning.Īlthough that company focused on the brawny Japanese rockets of the Nineties, Bizek and owner Trey Cobb shared a passion for older JDM icons. He was exposed to this alien world while playing Gran Turismo, and became fascinated by the Japanese affinity for converting econoboxes into understated giant- killers. “If it’s got a throttle cable, I still like it.”īizek, 41, is a meditative and articulate observer of JDM culture.

“I have a theoretical cutoff line for the cars I like to deal with,” he says.

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