Particularly endearing are the home-made models of Impul’s vehicles that intersperse the trophies, hand-painted 1/24-scale model kits and hastily-assembled radio-controlled cars. There’s Benoit Treluyer’s second-place plaque from Formula Nippon 2009, various Super GT trophies the famous Calsonic team has picked up, and a helmet belonging to team founder Kazuyoshi Hoshino. On top of the cupboards and right the way around the showroom – which can’t measure more than twenty square metres – are scores and scores of awards the team has won over the years. There’s a rack stuffed with dog-eared magazines, some mismatched tables and chairs at which a customer sips tea while he waits for his car, and an adjoining office piled high with invoice slips and manuals. Three cars are rammed in bumper to bumper, surrounded by a few cabinets containing parts and merchandise. Trophies from high-level races out on display in the open air!ĭespite being such a slick outfit on the track, there’s something very homely about their main showroom. Their main international claim to fame is probably running the Calsonic Nissan team in the Japanese GT series, the blue number 12 car familiar to millions across the globe as a result of their appearance in the Gran Turismo computer game series. Their founder Kazuyoshi Hoshino has an impressive record in top-level international racing, including appearances as a Nissan works driver at Le Mans and Daytona and even a brief stint in Formula One. Impul have been responsible for countless GT and Formula Nippon triumphs, running consistently at the front in Japanese motor sport over the last decade. It’s not so much ‘blink and you miss it’ as ‘don’t look up and you miss it’, because the only obvious external cues are the big signs on the wall and above the windows. Impul’s garage is an unassuming building at the side of a busy, leaf-lined road, hemmed in between an American car importer and a vehicle hire firm. ![]() Two trains, a brief walk and the obligatory stop at a Calpis vending machine later, I was there. I hadn’t had time to do my homework other than to find out which station to get off at and which of Tokyo’s many rail lines to take to get there, so it would have to be a flying visit. This time, though, I was heading west out into the huge and largely residential Setagaya Ward, to the Sakuragaoka area. ![]() Much like the Nismo visit, I had to jump on a train out to the sticks of Tokyo to get there. If you look carefully you’ll see the umbrella I left. Winner of the Newbery Award for Ginger Pye, author of the much-loved Moffat books and, more recently, The Coat-Hanger Christmas Tree, Eleanor Estes has drawn from her remembrances of the children who came to the Chatham Square Library in Chinatown, where she once worked, to create this humorous and childlike story, one that warmly evokes the specialness of New York's Chinatown and that is perfectly matched by Jacqueline Ayer's charming pen-and-ink drawings.Impul. With her best friend, Mae Lee, using their special code, they kept watch on a mysterious stranger and a laughing lady and in the end they solved the mystery of the lost umbrella in a wholly satisfying way. ![]() Though she had never traveled alone before, Kim Chu's search led her on an adventurous journey-onto an El train that raced and rattled to South Ferry and then onto a ferry boat to Staten Island. One rainy day, Kim Chu borrowed the umbrella without permission to protect the library books she was returning, and while she chose new books it was stolen from the umbrella stand! It must be found. Each year her father made a beautiful dragon for the New Year's Day Parade and this year his dragon had won the prize-an elegant black umbrella with a little secret compartment in the handle. ![]() Nine-year-old Kim Chu lived in New York City's Chinatown, near the rumbling elevated trains and-best of all-near the Chatham Square Library.
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