Sumo Power Open Day

If you live in the UK and you're a Jap car enthusiast you should really have heard of Sumo Power, there's no excuse really. They are one of if not the largest distributors of Japanese tuner parts in the country.

They had recently been taken over by the JRM group and had moved into a brand new state of the art facility in Rye. As such, they were having an open day to show off their new facilities. Coincidentally Junichi Umemoto, the President of J's Racing was going to be there as Sumo are the UK distributor for J's Racing; there was no question I was going to go :)

I made my way to down to Rye accompanied by my good friend Tsuyoshi. When we arrived, to say the place was huge was a little bit of an understatement. This place was gargantuous! I must have counted about 25 Evo X RS's in their own work bays alone!

We'll get to the some pictures of the facilities later, but what was by far the highlight of my day was meeting Umemoto San. As I had ordered a huge amount of J's parts via TGM, I caught up with Mark Gould the Sales Manager to see what the likely timelines were. Noticing that all the famous tuners were sitting in a private room, I boldly asked if I could meet Umemoto San. Mark dragged him away from the President of Do-Luck and told him I wanted to know when my parts were arriving! Not wanting to give the wrong idea I told his translator that I was a big fan and wanted to tell him the plans for my car. Conversation was a bit awkward until Tsuyo piped up in Japanese. Cue look of shock on Umemoto San's face that there was another Japanese speaker in da house - BOO-Ya! :p

Umemoto San gave me lots of advice, to give a brief extract:

• For a fast road setting, try camber settings of -2.5 at the front and -1.5 at the rear.
• He recommended choosing the widest GT Wing possible as I was not under any race regulation restrictions. This as it happens is 1600mm.
• The one type of brace he would always fit to a non-caged road car were fender braces above anything else. It so happened this was part of my order :)
• He recommended fitting their front lower arm pillow bushing set. This would address the almost vertical caster angle found on the DC5 by off-setting it forward by 5.5mm. The resulting high caster angle would enhance the straight line stability and reduce pitching (vertical shaking). Furthermore, because these were pillow bushings, they would provide more stable cornering, an increase in mechanical grip and sharper steering response by limiting the alignment movement.
• Last but not least he told me he had plans to bring their famous Fit (Jazz over here) over to Brands for a demonstration. If he was able to, he told me to come down and he would re-flash my ECU!

Junichi Umemoto, me and Tsuyo

 We exchanged business cards so that I could keep him updated on my car's progress. I don't think many normal punters have one of these...

Had to do a bit of discreet photoshop identity protection here ;)

We also got a mention in his blog. Check out the 13/03/10 entry ;)
http://ameblo.jp/umemotojunichi/archive2-201003.html#main

A few pictures of the cars at the facilities

Sumo Power (in collaboration with Nismo) FIA GT1 Race Car

A serious Rays wheel there

A couple of the MANY Evo X RS race cars at the facility

Official J's Racing approved UK S2K

Sumo Power 1000bhp Fuujin R33 Drag Car

JRM's Evo XIII 2.0L Hard block 1400hp spec crate motor, run on methanol

Sumo Power S14 Vertex Drift Car

Last but not least, I picked up a J's Racing oil cap and rad cap