RIP, Yutaka Katayama, Mr. K

4 years ago, on February 19, 2015, Yutaka Katayama passed away. This post was published in his honor on March 13, 2015 on CarLustBlog.com. Dead links have been removed, with only minor editing done.

Mr. K and the 1958 Australian Mobilgas Trial-winning, 10,000+ mile-surviving Datsun 210, part of two-car team he managed. Both finished.

As car-people, we delve into this topic a little more often than most folk. This is how I came to learn not only of the Datsun/Nissan Z-car, but the people behind it. Amongst them a name stood out: Yutaka Katayama. 

Yutaka Katayama was not a racecar driver like James Garner. He did not own a shop like Carroll Shelby that churned out neither hot-rods or limited-edition sportscars. Neither was he a pop-culture icon like Leonard Nimoy that had a taste for cars. He was, to put it bluntly, a salesman (he specialized in advertisement early in his career at Nissan). But not just any salesman, he was a salesman who was also a car guy.

1984-86 Ford Mustang SVO

I usually go on and on about cars with big honkin’ V-8s in big American iron and leave the sporty little 1980s turbo coupes to my fellow bloggers. That’s probably the result of the era that I grew up in, where displacement was king and handling an afterthought, if that. Long hood, short deck, and no fewer than 8 cylinders of raw muscle, that’s for me, thankyouverymuch.

In a departure from my usual schtick, I shall now sing the praises of another of the forgotten Mustangs  and a true It Rolls special: a 4-cylinder turbocharged Mustang, the SVO (Special Vehicle Operations) made from 1984-1986. It was probably the closest the Mustang ever came to a European-style coupe in terms of execution and all-around performance. And, of course, in true It Rolls fashion, it pretty much went nowhere, too.

The SuBAru Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter and the Chicken Tax

Which may quite possibly be the single longest post title in the history of It Rolls (I have personally directed several of our crack team of automotive researchers to drop everything they’re doing to check this out). In the meantime, we have here a little vehicle that has amused me greatly over the years, not only with its diminutive size compared to other big bad-ass pickups but by its being named after a sausage.

I saw most of these in the wild back in the late ’70s in Wisconsin which had, for some unfathomable reason (which the crack team of researchers will surely get to investigating next) a rather high concentration of Subarus. And BRATs. Well, and brats, too. Frankly, at the time I never gave them a whole lot of thought, except maybe to snigger at the name and wonder how cool it would be to ride in the jump seats in the back. Otherwise, they mostly slipped under my radar until fairly recently; I used to occasionally see them bouncing around the Seattle area (another hotbed of Subaru-dom) although not a single one in my short time in the Phoenix area.

I suppose if the El Camino is the Steve McQueen of cars, the BRAT would be the. . . .Ronald Reagan? Yes, there is a connection there which we shall see shortly. While this may not be the longest post in the history of It Rolls, it certainly is the. . . .wurst.