Smokey Nagata Was Building Viral JDM Legends Before the Internet Existed

Kazuhiko "Smokey" Nagata's career started with a small act of workplace trespass. In 1978, while working at the tuning shop that would become Trust/GReddy, he began quietly using the facility after hours to build his own projects — work secret enough from official business that the cars themselves picked up the name Top Secret. Trust's leadership tolerated it, partly because Nagata's own background as a Toyota mechanic made him too useful to push out. He made it official in 1991, leaving to found Top Secret outright in a small garage in Chiba.

The car most people picture when they hear the name is gold. Top Secret's signature paint scheme isn't cosmetic branding — it's a rank. White is for cars still in development; gold only goes on builds that have earned it through a genuine speed or power record. The GT-300 Supra, a 3S-GTE four-cylinder pushed past 10,000 rpm for roughly 700 horsepower to the rear wheels, wears the gold for exactly that reason, and today sits on permanent display at the Audrain Automobile Museum in Newport, Rhode Island.

It wasn't Top Secret's only headline-grabbing Supra. An earlier RB26-swapped A80, nicknamed "0-300" for its 0-300 km/h runs, set a rear-wheel-drive record for the sprint. A later build went the opposite direction entirely — a 5.0-liter V12 pulled from a Toyota Century sedan, twin-turbocharged to roughly 930 horsepower and 745 lb-ft, that Nagata took to Italy's Nardò high-speed ring in 2008 and ran to 358 km/h (222.6 mph). On the Nissan side, Top Secret's tuned R33 GT-R and a Skyline carrying a 4.5-liter twin-turbo V8 out of a Nissan Cima reached 341 km/h (212 mph) on a closed stretch of German Autobahn.

Nagata's most infamous run, though, happened somewhere he wasn't supposed to be going that fast at all. In 1998, on a UK motorway at roughly 3 a.m., he was clocked at 194 mph by police in the gold GT-300 Supra — still the highest speed ever recorded on an English public road. He was banned from driving in the UK for ten years and fined for the stunt, and the Supra itself was impounded before making its way back to Japan. It only added to the car's legend rather than dimming it.

Top Secret has stayed active well past its speed-run heyday — Ryuji Miki won the 2004 D1GP drift championship driving a Top Secret-prepared Nissan Silvia S15 — but Nagata's own reputation was built the old way, one genuinely insane, independently witnessed run at a time, long before any of it could go viral on its own.