Importfest Toronto — JDM Cars, Old Friends and Why Some Things Never Change

Liberty Walk wideboday GR86 at Importfest Toronto

This post is about cars. But it's also about old friendships.

I went to Importfest Toronto this weekend with three friends. One is a buddy I've been hanging out with since high school — we've stayed consistently close. One is someone who was also one of my best friends in high school but we drifted apart after university. And one is a university friend who knew both of these guys back in the day — we all overlapped and hung out together quite a bit, especially during the university years.

Why Importfest Hit Different With These Friends

Importfest is a modified car show — primarily JDM. And these were my people during the late 90s and early 2000s, which I genuinely believe was the pinnacle of JDM culture. Not in terms of raw performance — cars today are faster and easier to tune for high horsepower than anything from that era. But the cultural moment was different. JDM cars from that period spawned the Fast and Furious franchise. They made Honda VTEC a widely known acronym among enthusiasts. They turned specific import models into household names within the car community.

These friends all drove Hondas back then. Couple of them still do today. Within the group, right now one drives an Integra Type S, while another drives a Honda S2000. One drives a Challenger Scat Pack now — manual transmission, of course.

Walking through Importfest together, we were impressed by everything. But we kept getting pulled back to the 90s and early 2000s builds. The DC2 Integras. The EG Civics. And then we came across an EF CRX.

We fawned over it. Genuinely. Because seeing one in real life in 2026 is genuinely rare — most of them are gone now, either modified beyond recognition, rusted out or simply worn away by time. Seeing a clean one at a show stops you in your tracks.

The VTEC Conversation

We got talking about our current cars versus the Honda VTEC engines of the old days — the B18C, the H22A, the engines that defined that era for enthusiasts. And we all agreed on the same thing. Current engines are objectively faster and more capable. But there's something about those old Honda engines — the high-revving nature of them, the way horsepower built through the rev range, the specific moment the VTEC crossover hit and the engine started screaming — that just felt different. More mechanical. More connected.

On the drive home, my friend rode with me in the 370Z. I did a couple of pulls to show him what the car does — and also to demonstrate something I've been thinking about. The 370Z is a naturally aspirated car with a 7,500rpm redline, but the horsepower noticeably starts falling off after 6,000rpm. It doesn't scream to the redline the way an old Honda did. It's a different character entirely. Neither is wrong — but they're genuinely different experiences, and that conversation made both of us appreciate what each era got right. It is making me feel like I want to get a Honda with Vtec though 😂.

After the Show — Dinner and Old Memories

After Importfest we grabbed a quick dinner at a Jack Astor's nearby. And it was just good. Easy conversation, catching up properly, the kind of dinner that doesn't need an agenda.

We talked about mutual university friends and who still keeps in touch with who. We talked about places we used to hang out — and the funny thing is that specific names came up immediately, despite none of us having been to most of these places for over two decades. Many of them don't even exist anymore. But we still remembered them clearly — the karaoke spots, the coffee places, the late-night hangouts. We even remembered specific people who worked there, because we used to be there so often as young guys with nowhere better to be.

And of course we couldn't get through dinner without talking about karaoke 😂 — I've written about it before, and it came up naturally because several of these friends and I go way back on karaoke nights together. We talked about which spots might still be around and unanimously agreed we need to organize a proper karaoke night soon. Cars and karaoke — apparently that's always been our thing and nothing has changed.

Final Thought

On the drive home I turned to my friend and said — "isn't it funny that after all these years, we still kind of act the same around each other?"

I've written about revertigo before — that phenomenon where people revert to their younger selves around old friends. But this felt like something different and more specific than that.

Revertigo is about acting young again. What I'm describing is something quieter — a kind of intimacy that comes from having genuinely known someone for a long time. Because we shared so much history together, there's no warm-up period required. No need to establish context or figure out the dynamic. You just slot back in. The conversation flows immediately because the foundation was built decades ago and it hasn't gone anywhere.

We're all grown up now. Careers, families, responsibilities. But when we're together, there's no filter. No performance. Just people being themselves around other people who have known them long enough that pretending would be pointless anyway.

Maybe the definition of who you are shouldn't be anchored to who you were when you were young. But there's something genuinely valuable about having people in your life who knew you then and still choose to show up now. That's not revertigo. That's just a good friendship.

And apparently it comes with a side of JDM cars and karaoke 😂