M-Bros – The art of car building

M-Bros isn’t a familiar name to me, many others would agree but being tucked in a rice field a few hours from Osaka it’s no suprise.

During the K-Tours / Drift Kansai tour there is allocated tour days to see workshops, find used parts and visit manufacturers, the tour we set in Golden week is a whole week of public holidays and creates a huge amount of traffic on the roadways. The tour departed Shinsaibashi headed for M-Bros  and traveled in walking pace traffic from the start, until Shane from Drift Kansai took us on a togue style detour

We were having second thoughts about spending the time in traffic and allocating such a large block of the day to make the trip but it was more then worth while.

We arrived to find Kuroi with the gearbox of his D1SL S15 in pieces after another failure, he had a 6speed box grave yard in he corner of the workshop. He has decided to use the stronger S14 5speed for reliability and strength.

We spent quite a bit of time chatting with Kuroi via Shane’s translations and got a few tips from the man who creates some of the worlds best drift cars. Unassuming from the outside…

… But one then you see the D1SL winners cheque from last year after Nakamura took out the series

The M-Bros shop is responsible for the setup for most the team burst cars,  they make their own knuckles, strengthen the subframes and some trade secret tweaks to get the cars to the dominating level we are accustomed to seeing.

The M-Bros S15 was white last year and has had 7 coats of paint to achieve the depth and vibrant hue for the 2011 D1SL season .

This stop was one of the most memorable and inspirational moments of the tours, getting advice from one of the best and getting a sneak peak at the origins of some of the worlds most famous drift cars.