The latest issue of RevSpeed magazine has just arrived so I thought I'd do a quick run through to show you what it's about. RevSpeed isn't exclusive to the Mazda Roadster and includes articles and topics across a wide range of cars and tuning options. The magazine costs around £6 and is geared towards the modifying, racing and tuning scene rather than road tests and sensible consumer advice. This month's issue features a great shot of the Trial ND Roadster on the front cover.
The Trial Roadster is painted in Mazda's light grey metallic Ceramic colour and features Rays ZE40 wheels with Yokohama tyres and thousands of pounds worth of Recaro Sportster seats. It makes for a good looking front cover but there isn't much more about the car inside which is a shame. There are however, many cool looking adverts for performance parts such as lightweight alloy wheels, designer exhausts, and a myriad of other tuning parts. The Blitz advert shows off some of their Roadster specific tuning parts and features their white demo RF model.
Inside we find a feature named "Cool Spec" which details a selection of tuning shop cars such as Waste Sports' 600PS Skyline R34 GT-R, and the Zeromax Impreza STI. These write-ups talk about the parts fitted to the car and the improvements they have made. They go into quite a bit of detail about things like suspension spring rates and camshaft specifications.
As well as car introductions, the magazine also includes reviews and tests of new tuning parts. As an example there is an article about the new Bilstein B12 dampers for the Roadster, and a detailed technical review of the Volk TE37 alloy wheel. Even tuned Kei cars are featured with the Honda S660 and Suzuki Alto proving popular.
Bundled with this issue is a region-free DVD containing a variety of short videos. These include a section hosted by Keiichi Tsuchiya in which he offers tips to improve driver's track techniques with lots of onboard video and heel/toe action. There is a film about setting up and using GPS telemetery gadgets and how to analyse the data to improve racing lines and laptimes. A parts review section focuses on big brake upgrades, and there are reports from the Fuji Wonderland festival.
I would recommend picking up a copy of RevSpeed if you're at all interested in Japan's tuning culture. Of course it helps if you can read, or are learning to read Japanese, but if not you can still enjoy the photography.