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A few years ago I received an email from Team Ikuzawa in Japan. The writer introduced himself as Tetsu Ikuzawa and announced that he wanted to visit TwinSpark Central. Delighted with the interest in our business, I started to research who our mysterious future visitor was.

As it turned out, Tetsu Ikuzawa is in Japan what Steve McQueen is in the West: Mr UeberCool. Tetsu has raced anything on wheels in his 70 years on this planet, from motorcycles, GTs, formula 3000 and Sportscars of several kinds. As far as I could find out, Tetsu was the only Japanese Porsche factory racer ever and one of the few Japanese finishers at Le Mans, a.o. In a K3 935 which we saw race at the Oldtimer GP a few years ago.

I realized that Tetsu was not only the exact same age as our friend Gijs van Lennep, but they must have raced at a few events in Europe at the same time in Porsche 906-s. I invited Tetsu to join me for dinner and asked if he would like to have Gijs join us for the occasion. Tetsu confirmed his interest in meeting up with his fellow legend and an epic dinner appointment was in the making.

In August 2010 Tetsu visited the Netherlands and the dinner was a unique event. Gijs and Tetsu turned out to know all the same people from the racing scene of the 60’s and early seventies, but they had never met, even when they were in the same races!

The next day Tetsu and his spouse visited our warehouse and workshop and was sufficiently impressed to ask us to do an inspection on a 901 gearbox he had built in the UK, but felt uncertain about. The gearbox was destined for used in his 1965 race car you see in the above picture. We also composed a custom version of the WEVO 901 shifter for him, by mating a black SL Shift Knob to the early style lever.

When he turned 70, Tetsu sent us a copy of a scrapbook composed by his daughter, covering his life in general with priceless photo’s of him with the various vehicles he raced over the decades. My favorite is Tetsu posing next to his Signal Yellow 1973 911 S Targa in a fashionable Afghan coat and donning John Lennon style sunglasses. 40 years later he had this car restored at the factory and ordered a 997 version in the same color with the same pepita interior. Surely Porsche doesn’t have that many similar enthusiast clients.

We have stayed in touch over the last few years and have followed the resconstruction of Tetsu’s 65 911 racer, decked out with all the right equipment and finished impeccably in Japan.

In the meanwhile Tetsu has raced his early 911 toy at a private track in Japan and he sent me these photo’s of the event, where he beat a gaggle of other historic racers. His kind message thanked us for the help in putting together the winning car, but I think Tetsu is the kind of racer that would have won even if he had only a 4th gear available!

At TwinSpark we are rather mad about putting our early 911s to good use and we applaud fellow enthusiasts like Tetsu for doing the same. But we have few kindred spirits in our network who go about thrashing their 911 around at age 70! Power to you Tetsu, you inspire us all!