A visit to Team Poison Headquarters

I got invited by my friend Tsuba to visit his compound deep in the forests of Chiba, where he runs Takahashi Autoworks with his father and lives with his family. Tsuba spends most of his time here working on customer and friends’ cars, mainly drift cars. If you don’t know, he’s the leader of the all-purple drift team ‘Poison’.

The scenery was beautiful, trees wrapped around us and no city noise, just birds and the occasional JZ or SR echoing through the windy roads. At one point, I spotted some strange-looking small deer grazing in the distance. I was surprised, but Tsuba told me they were invasive Kyon from China / Taiwan that had escaped a closed zoo. Even though only a few deer got out, their population has now exploded to around 70,000 and they’ve been damaging crops across southern Chiba. Wild.

Tsuba gave me a full tour of the property, so many cars everywhere. Work-in-progress cars, running cars, future projects, and a few that had already met their end. Two standout builds are his brown SR20-powered S13 Silvia running an APEXi RX6 turbo kit that makes the SR sound like a chainsaw, and his purple SR20-powered C33 Laurel, which he regularly takes to Mobara Twin Circuit, conveniently just 15 minutes away. That Laurel’s actually been on the cover of Drift Tengoku and helped his team win the Video Option Ikaten battle at Ebisu Circuit.

Walking through all the rooms and sheds full of parts while Tsuba explained what everything was, it was all pretty cool. He’s got some rare stuff too, like the original lightning airbrushed G-Corporation S13 fibreglass front fenders, and a bunch of monkey bikes, some with custom airbrushing by Tsuba himself. I think it’s super cool to see a space like this, a place where he can be creative with his craft, work alongside his father, and be surrounded by peace and nature. What more could you ask for?