EDIT
6/25/2025: Due to multiple DMCA notices that I received, torrent link
has been removed for the safety of this blog. The actual content itself
can still be found on the usual spot—that is, if the torrent page there
wasn't deleted by me.
Fansub credits can be found in the link above.Back with another live-action movie sub! Toho's "F2 Grand Prix" from 1984—"the first and last F2 racing movie", as Wikipedia JP likes to put it. This is a drama set in the world of F2 racing, where three racers—Yutaka Imoto (Ken Tanaka), a regular, Keiji Sasaki (Toru Minegishi), a longtime champion, and Satoru Nakano (Kiichi Nakai), a rookie—all compete for the title of champion in the '83 Japan Grand Prix tournament.
Interestingly enough, this movie was made before the F2 racing boom hit Japan—this kind of racing wasn't yet popular in Japan and consequently the movie did not do well as a result. I guess even the author of the original book that this movie was based on wasn't confident about turning this into a movie, as he seemingly went "Are you serious?" when he was approached by Toho and asked about making a live-action adaptation of his work.
I originally discovered the movie when I was going through Kentaro Haneda's movie score list many many years ago—I was under the impression this movie was never re-released again past its initial theatrical release as I couldn't find much info online but I did manage to discover that this had a VHS release, and only that. (On a similar note, I wonder if its performance affected its ability to get released on DVD...)
Unfortunately I couldn't do much about the movie because the VHS was rare as hell. I pretty much forgot about it until years later when an encoder that I frequently work with informed me that a recent HD TV broadcast of the movie was posted onto private torrent sites, and with JP captions at that! The rest is self-explanatory.
As far as video/audio quality goes: Toho clearly got this re-scanned, and it definitely beats having a VHS rip. Sadly there's a lot of film damage here (just color fading, mostly), which I couldn't do anything about. I was told that distributors typically release the raw footage on streaming sites before fixing it up for a home media release but I have no clue if Toho will do that anytime soon with this movie.
The audio is also clearly sourced from VHS—which is fine! The VHS release was in stereo and no doubt would have easily beaten the film's optical track, but there's some clicking here & there and some drop-outs throughout the movie. I can't confirm if it was mastered like that, and the audio being lossy doesn't help. The volume was really quiet, so I raised the volume a little bit. I really didn't want to do that since, again, the audio was lossy, but in the end it won't actually matter anyway (and you'll see why at the end of this post).
Also, I don't know if this was on the VHS release or if this was a consequence of not having captured the audio correctly but the audio slows down like crazy after the end credits—kind of like turning off a turntable as it's still playing and immediately lifting up the needle afterwards. It's jarring.
I'll be honest—don't expect Oscar-level quality from this movie. This isn't to say the movie is bad! It isn't, far from it. But the drama in this movie isn't really mind-blowing stuff or anything. Maybe you'll have more interest in it if you're super obsessed with car racing or something.
Some final notes:
I actually intend on releasing a v2 of this movie, but it won't be any time soon. I lucked out and managed to snag a copy of the movie on VHS—the plan is to get the audio recorded in FLAC, digitally clean it up, and paste it over the movie. I'm also intending to include some other minor bonus goodies with the torrent, and I may possibly get it translated in Spanish too but I can't promise anything about that one.
Anyways, enjoy!
