So I received a curious little package in the mail today…

A surprise box from the Mattel toy company is never a bad thing right?  I’m not sure if I’ve ever been so excited to open mail before….  is it what I hope it is?

WHAAAA??!!!

Our shop name on a Hot Wheels car??   Childhood dream: complete.

This has been quite a few months in the making but I haven’t mentioned anything because I didn’t wan’t to jinx myself until it actually happened.  Needless to say I am beyond ecstatic to be a part of something that I feel has undoubtedly had a great deal in shaping my affection for automobiles from my early childhood to what it is today.  If you think about it, for most of us Hot Wheels were probably our very first exposure to cars.   It also means so much more to me now because I have a couple young children of my own and it makes me very pleased to know that there are now cars dedicated to the genre that WE love that they can play with and I am very much honored and humbled to have JDM Legends be a part of it.

I have to give a HUGE thanks to Jun Imai at Mattel for being a J-tin enthusiast himself and setting this whole thing up as well as Brandon Ozaki (whom I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet) for designing such an awesome car.    While we haven’t yet imported an SA22 RX-7  it’s definitely a car that  fits in with what we do here.  I’ve actually been looking for a decent SA22 in Japan for quite some time now because as some of you may or may not know, the owner and founder of JDM Legends Trey Cobb, started out his automotive career before Cobb Tuning at a place known for building some of the fastest RX-7′s in the country called Rotary Performance.  Obviously he’s VERY excited about the platform having owned multiple 7′s of all generations over the years so the next question is when do we get started on the full scale replica?  :)