After a year Lyons moved to Tokyo because he wanted to get on with his life and relax a bit more. He now lives on the outskirts of the city with his Australian girlfriend and admits there's a vibrant social scene. "Most of our friends are models and strippers."
Girls, it would seem, are an ever-present feature of Japanese life and the job of racing queen is a full-time affair. Yu Saito was voted Race Queen of the Year 2004. "It is a great honor to represent my sponsor," she says robotically, "and the racecar drivers are really cool, particularly the foreign ones."
But how does she feel about being leered at by middle-aged men with long-lens cameras? "Oh," she says with a giggle, "I'm happy to be watched."
The youth and frivolity of the girls is juxtaposed with a paying audience that is surprisingly old. Instead of young and garish street racers boasting about their 1,000-hp Skylines, the crowd is dominated by middle-aged men buying clutch plates. Even the sideways heroes of the "Drift X-tream Show" are well into their 30s and our NISMO host accepts that "contrary to popular perceptions, the tuning industry in Japan is actually quite geeky."
The owners' area, which is packed with aging GT-Rs and Z-cars, reinforces this image. Many of these owners have driven for hours just to complete one processional lap of the circuit and most boast the telltale T-shirts of an owner's club.
Akihiro Moroe is proudly displaying a Datsun Fairlady 240Z he built using new parts sourced from across the world. "More than 90 percent of the parts are brand-new," he says. "I worked on it every day and it took me 18 months to build." Wouldn't it have been easier just to buy a new Z? "The Z is too easy," reckons Moroe. "You have to check the weather and adjust the carbs on a 240 before you go out."
It's the end of the day and most of the 15,000 visitors are gathering in the main stand to watch the grand finale, a birthday surprise for two of the drivers. Two giant cakes have been prepared and 29 members of the crowd dutifully hold up cards spelling "Happy birthday, Benoit and Toshihiro."
There are some congratulatory words before the scene descends into farce as Lyons stuffs the cake into his teammate's face. "Somebody always ends up in the cake," he says, as the race queens run for cover and the somewhat bemused audience responds with polite applause.
Lyons admits he earns a good living, has laid firm foundations and will miss Japan if Europe or the United States come calling. "It takes a committee of 10 people to decide to open a door," he says, "but everything's clean and the trains run on time. I'd miss the standard of living."
Looking back over a multimillion-dollar grid, it's easy to empathize with him. The NISMO festival has conjured an image of the Japanese motoring scene quite unlike that portrayed in the movies or the virtual world of computer games.
This is a world in which mad cars and naughty girls meet a deeply conservative culture. Here, on a hilltop, hundreds of miles away from the neon of Tokyo, this is without question the real Gran Turismo.
Inside The CarOn the day before the festival, we got to ride with Richard Lyons in the 500-bhp R34 Skyline that won the Japanese GT Championship in '99. Like most GT cars, this R34 was never really designed to carry two passengers, so we've been stuffed into a makeshift seat, with the roll cage for close company. Lyons never actually raced this car and he's had just one lap in which to get to know it. "It's a bit of a beasty," he says as we trundle out of the pit lane.
With 500 hp and 521 lb-ft of torque propelling just 2,645 pounds, this car is on the rapid side of seriously quick. And if anything, it feels even faster because the turbo arrives with such force that it snaps our heads back. It's an effort just to hang on to a bit of cage and watch Lyons at work.
Aida is a point-and-squirt circuit where a couple of longish straights are interspersed with some twiddly bits. "It always feels a bit dangerous," Lyons shouts as we approach the top corner at nearly 170 mph, "there's very little run-off."
The Skyline is a huge car, and through the tighter corners we use every last inch of the track and then some. The comparison with a standard R34 is futile. This is a totally different machine and the sensations are more extreme than any road car could ever muster. The noise alone is enough to scare small children.
Lyons, though, seems completely unperturbed. "You need to remember," he explains as we return to the pits, "that the single-seater Formula Nippon car is 7 seconds per lap faster." Awesome.