The Kansai Connection
Hiroyuki Hasegawa, an ex-Yamaha Motor Company engineer, and his partner Mr Kitagawa secured a capital investment from Sigma Automotive Co. Ltd (hence the name HKS – Hasegawa, Kitagawa, Sigma) and began power tuning petrol engines in a dairy-farming shed at the foot of Mount Fuji, in Japan.
The next year Hasegawa-san designed and built the first Japanese after market turbocharger destined for a passenger car, the business expanded and more staff were taken aboard.
One of those was Toshiyuki Mukai, a young man with a natural engineering talent and a loyalty that has seen him remain with the company ever since.
Now 30 years on, HKS and Mukai-san have been true pioneers in the Japanese after market performance industry. While HKS has delivered a host of exciting new products (including the first commercially available electronic turbo timer and boost controller), Mukai-san formed HKS Kansai Service, perhaps the most famous Japanese tuning house of them all.
It’s a huge complex in Nara, an hour or so out from Japan’s second biggest city Osaka, and is testament to the fact this is a serious operation, but one quite uncharacteristic in its business approach.
While Mukai-san’s business equivalents don a suit and tie each morning, he prefers an attire similar to that of his workers. While his business equivalents are chauffeured round to corporate meetings in big, black luxury sedans, Mukai-san slips behind the wheel of his latest toy and gets there quicker. Among Japan’s straight-cut business ideals Mukai-san is the black sheep, but his down-to-earth nature is perhaps just one reason why he has become successful.
The work environment at HKS Kansai is a good one, staff turnover is almost non-existent, and everyone takes the utmost pride in their work. Mukai-san takes care of them, and they return the favour. I guess the extent of Mukai-san’s rank within the industry is no better displayed than by the number of HKS Kansais own Japanese performance cars which were kicking around the complex. A 2003 Subaru Impreza STI, Nissan’s new Z-car and a Lancer Evolution VIII were the some of the newest acquisitions to the fleet, and all were hand-delivered to Mukai well in advance of their respective Japanese public launches.
The Lancer, which had only just gone on sale in Japan a month or so before our visit, had already been R&D’d by HKS Kansai for more than six months in a win-win situation for both parties. Mitsubishi would sell more units because performance upgrade parts would be available from the first delivery of the new cars, and HKS would be one of the companies selling the parts.
The main workshop hosts a number of work bays and hoists, and this is where nearly all the component fitting is carried out. As a big part of the HKS range of performance products are simple bolt-on upgrades, many of the jobs are fairly simple, and it’s out back where it all gets a little more serious.
Full ground up builds, custom fabrication work and race car engineering can all be carried out from one place at HKS Kansai Service, and with Mukai-san’s stringent quality control and meticulous attention to detail, it’s all top notch work.
In another, smaller workshop, Kansai Service has its own suspension department where custom set-ups are fully fabricated to individual specification, and new off-the-shelf units are designed and put through their paces before being produced on a larger scale at a HKS manufacturing plant.
There’s an R&D room, in which an Evolution VIII Lancer was being trial fitted with a new custom tubular exhaust manifold design, and a rolling road dynamometer, where performance upgrades can be tested in real time and HKS F-Con V engine management systems are finely tuned by simply the best in the business.
After a quick look through a showroom that was literally packed with HKS goodies (hello T-51Rs!), Mukai-san led us down the back of the HKS Kansai estate for a look at stuff you just don’t get to see every day. Between the two or three extra warehouses to the rear of the main building sat around 20-odd cars, most of them the preceding models to those new acquisitions in the car park.
I spotted a R34 GT-R M-Spec Nur, R34 GT-R V-Spec, R33 GT-R V-Spec, R32 GT-Rs, a turbo Aristo, Lancer Evolution VI Is to IVs, the list went on! All the cars had once served a purpose for HKS, they had all been featured in Japanese tuning magazines, and at the pointy end of their lives they had served as perfect marketing tools for Kansai service an the HKS brand.
Down some stairs, and we were into another huge room. This one had around 30 sets of expensive 18-inch wheels (think Volk TE37s and the like JDM-infatuated people!) shod with different grades of Advan high-performance rubber. Mukai-san had tested these for Yokohama – some wheels and tyres had done just one lap before being put into retirement.
This was cruel, I wanted them!
Seeing my disbelief Mukai-san then, with a smile on his face, thought it would be a good time to rub more sal into the wound by pointing out around 20 blanket-covered engines in another corner of the room. “All RB26,” he beamed. “No,” I replied, but I suppose one is rarely enough, is it. A few hours after we arrived, our HKS Kansai visit was over.
I had managed to photograph a few cars (a couple you can read more about in upcoming issues), and even been taken out to lunch in Mukai-san’s own freshly-tuned ‘03 Impreza STI, in which he wasted no time in displaying just how quickly the speedometer could wind back round to zero! HKS Kansai Service – you’ve all seen the stickers, and now you know.
Source: Performance Car