(engine revving) - Porsche purists hate him
for this one simple trick. This enigmatic Japanese outfit took one of the most
iconic German cars ever and went absolutely
overboard with over fenders. You either love or hate the widebody 911s with gigantic wings and weird names. You've seen a ton of RWB
videos on the internet, this one is different. This is everything you need
to know to get up to speed on R-W-B!
(logo banging) (classic video game music) (DMC DeLorean whirring)
(lightning cracks) We have a very fitting
sponsor for today's episode, REC Watches. Now, RWB has become a
legend throughout the world for their unmistakable, and you know, sometimes quite controversial aesthetics and not to mention completely
unownable for 99% of us, but now you have the
chance to at least own a piece of an RWB. That's because REC
Watches has collaborated with legendary Japanese
car tuner Akira Nakai, founder of RWB, creating the
limited edition 901 RWB watch. Each version of the limited edition watch contains an actual piece of metal from a Akira's personal RWB Porsche 911s, the Stella Artois or the Rotana. REC Watches has incorporated
the extreme widebody kit and RWB sticker decal into
the design of the 901 Stella and 901 Rotana time pieces. Just to mention one of
the many design elements they pay homage to. To own a dope time piece and
an actual piece of an RWB, check out the RWB collection
in the description and get 15% off the RWB pieces
using the code 15-OFF-DONUT. (logo reverberates) - [Narrator] Up To Speed! - If you're watching this channel, you've probably seen videos of Nakai-san sitting in his armchair,
smoking cigarettes and drinking Cokes as he shreds people's precious Porsches by hand, and if you haven't seen those videos, when you're done watching this video, you should go watch those videos because that is not what this video is. Today we're gonna meet the real Nakai-san. We're gonna look at
some of the sickest cars that he has built and we're gonna hear from some of our own friends. - What's up, Donut? - What's up, Brian Scotto
here from Hoonigan. - Who own some of his cars. (cymbals ting)
Chapter one, (typewriter tapping)
Rough World, rated PG-13. Akira Nakai has gained worldwide fame with his work on Porsches, but
before he even touched a 911 he had his hands all over
a different car, the AE86. (tires screeching) Back in the early '90s,
Nakai was part of a group of enthusiasts called the Rough World. This gang of ragtag car
tuners, took Hachi-Rokus, dropped 'em on their bellies,
slapped on some big ol' wangs and added so much negative camber that people called 'em "oni'kyan", (heavy metal music)
which translates to devil camber! Summer 2006, you ripped my heart out and you threw it on the
ground of the bathroom floor. (heavy metal music)
Devil camber! Devil camber (screams), devil camber! These dudes took their AE86s drifting on windy touges around Mount Tsukuba, just up the road from the
world-famous Tsukuba Circuit. The Rough World drift crew
gained a name for themselves as some of the baddest dudes around and Nakai was their leader. By the mid-90's Akira and
his crew started appearing in Japanese car mags
alongside their drift cars. The Rough World crew's
AE86s looked different than other cars they were
sharing the spotlight with. These cars looked aggressive, yet elegant, with their mismatched
wheels, big ol' wangs, and of course the digital
Rough World sticker on the windshield. They really did look
more rough than the cars that they were sharing the spotlight with, but what really set Rough
World apart from the others were how wide they were,
with fenders extending way past the stock body lines. These fender flares were an homage to the race-proven touring
car shapes of the early '90s. Even the 205 millimeter-wide tires were considered really wide back then. I mean, a stock 2020
Corolla has 225s right now, so they're not that wide,
but back then they were wide! Nakai-san loved wrenching
on these JDM classics, turned 'em into drift
missiles and time-attack cars, but there was one thing
that really stuck with him since his childhood, and that
was his love for Porsches. You guys probably coulda
guessed that though. Despite coming of age in Japan
during what is undoubtedly the golden era of JDM cars, Nakai had a bit of a wandering eye (Nakai gasps)
when it came to European cars with engines in the wrong place. Ever since he was a child, Nakai
had been a fan of Porsches. So it was quite serendipitous
when a damaged 911 showed up at his shop. Little did he know this would be the car that would make him and
Rough World world-famous. (cymbals ting)
Chapter two, Could I get a Stella Artois? You want a Stella? Two Stella's, can I get two... Just one Stella, one Stella
Artois, one Stella Artois. If there's one car that
completely sums up Nakai-san, it's this car... (engine revving)
(exhaust crackling) This 1985 Porsche 911
started its second life when it rolled into the shop
that Nakai was working at badly damaged. Now, rather than fix it up,
Nakai bought it from the owner to use as a track car. This wasn't his first
experience with a Porsche, his involvement with
the Stuttgart stallions had been building throughout the '90s, but this was the first
one that he ever owned, the first one that he had free rein to make whatever he wanted. Now, a lot of classic
911s, especially nowadays, live in heated garages with, you know, fricking moisture control or whatever, and they're only driven
to Cars and Coffees, then they're washed and
put back in the garage. Now Nakai wasn't interested in that. No, he wanted a car that
he could take to the track (heavy metal music)
and beat the ever-loving hell out of! So he did what he does
best, he took what he knew about tuning Japanese cars and applied it to his new Porsche. He installed Aragosta coilovers
and dropped it down a ton. He installed massive, endless brakes that were stuffed behind
18-inch Work Meister wheels. This is like the creme de
la creme of Japanese parts that he's thrown at this German car. He looked to his friends over at Promodet, a shop at a neighboring prefecture to help build the engine out. The Porsche flat-six was
tuned to make 360 buffed, just shiny Japanese stallions
with a redline of 8,500 RPM. (exhaust rumbling)
(engine revving) (tires screeching) To be a force on the track
Nakai went about stripping everything down in order to cut weight, the dash gone, the roof
gone, the doors gone, replaced with carbon fiber. He even went so far as to
replace the stock transmission with a five-speed from a Porsche 915 because it saves weight and space. By the end, he had cut
800 pounds of weight from the already light car, making it an incredible 2,100 pounds. In his heyday, Nolan
could deadlift this car. But if it weren't for the
work that he did on the body, I probably wouldn't be making a video about the guy right now. In a move that would give a
Porsche purist a heart attack, Nakai cut into the
fenders with an air saw. Not only that, he chose
to forego conventional fabrication techniques and did it by hand. Nakai put on massive
custom, carbon fiber fenders mimicking the 993 GT2
race cars of the '90s with his own personal
touch, hand-spaced rivets. Then he threw on a custom-made wing that is cartoonishly big,
but somehow it works. Now, he thought that
the Rough World sticker that had adorned his cars in the past might seem a little
outta place on this car so he translated Rough World to German, and that's how it became RAUH-Welt. Some people would rack their brains coming up with a sick name for their car. Nakai, although very opinionated, you can see that in all those
other videos with him in it I was talking about, is a
quiet man with simple tastes. He chose to name his car
after his favorite beer, Stella Artois, one that he
discovered on a trip to Belgium as a young man. Now this started out as a
passion project for Nakai-san, but what he would learn later is that this is the only advertising he would ever have to do for what became a hugely
successful business. (cymbals ting)
Chapter three, (typewriter tapping)
coming to America. By the mid-2000's, Nakai was
making a name for himself and his brand outside of
his home in Chiba, Japan. Despite not marketing the company, which was now officially named
RWB or RAUH-Welt BEGRIFF, German for "Rough World Understanding", which is the coolest
fricking name I've ever heard and this is like the
153rd episode of the show. Thanks to articles like
the ones written by Dino at Speedhunters and websites
like Fatlace and Auto-Otaku, the world was exposed to
these insane Porsche builds. Nowadays, Nakai, along with
people like Magnus Walker and Rod Emory have made the
outlaw Porsche-style mainstream, but at this time, desecrating
an air-cooled Porsche was seen as blasphemous. But whether the press was good or bad, it was working for Nakai. Word of RWB kept spreading and eventually reached entrepreneurs and Porsche enthusiasts, Mark
Arcenal and Brian Scotto. Mark was running Fatlace and ILLEST and Brian you may know him as
the co-founder of Hoonigan, but back then he was running
a magazine called "0-60". So, it was quite serendipitous... That's the second time
you've used that word, did you just learn it or something? Thank you for noticing, yes. My girlfriend got me a
word-of-the-day calendar and it is quite flossenosenhelipenicious. What I'm saying is it was good timing that RWB was looking to branch off and do work outside of Japan. So RWB rep, Toshiya
Ichiraku, got Nakai to agree to come build a few cars in America. Nakai traveled to Mark's
shop in San Mateo, named the Fatlace Paddock,
which would end up being the official US distributor for RWB. Scotto ended up being the only one who can make it that weekend, so him and Nakai went about figuring out what they were gonna do with his 964. - What's up, Brian Scotto
here from Hoonigan, and this, my RWB. This car was built in late 2011. It is one of the first
two RWBs built in America. I was working at a magazine called "0-60", during that time we did a
feature story on RAUH-Welt and it was one of the
first feature stories done in the United States, actually I think it was the first. So when Ken Block and I were
about to launch Hoonigan, we were thinking what
would be a cool project to put together? Something that was separate
from what Ken was doing and I already had a 1991 911 Turbo. We built this car, Mark
built a Signal Green C4, they were the first two
cars built here in the US. Nakai ended up dubbing this look and style after we built it "street-style". What street-style was,
was having less aggressive kind of front lips, so on the other ones there was an add-on rubber
flap that goes here. The double-stacked side
skirts didn't have those. So VWs, especially like Mk3s... You know what I'm talking about Pumphrey, Mk3's of course... Always had lower skirts
kinda painted black, it was like the Euro trim
and it was one of the things that I always liked about the car. So, that was the first little piece and then the second
Volkswagen homage are these. Known in the Volkswagen
world as crosshairs. My buddy Mike Campbell
helped me make these, a little nod to my Volkswagen days. This is actually an original Turbo car. An ANDIAL-kit Turbo car,
which for some purists was a huge bummer that I cut
this car up to make an RWB, but whatever.
(trunk bangs) It's kinda crazy to own
one of the early RWBs... What RWBs were and what
they meant to me in 2011 when this car was built,
is probably a lot different than what a lotta people see RWBs as now, there weren't really any show car RWBs, there was the guys racing in Japan, and then there were these cars. Almost 10 years later,
I still love the car, still happy that I built it. (door bangs) Still a fun car to drive.
(beep) (engine revving)
(tires screeching) - By the end of the weekend, Nakai had completed his
first two 911 builds outside of Japan. He named Scotto's Turbo 964, "Hoonigan" to coincide with the launch of Hoonigan, and he named Mark Arcenal's 911 after his new favorite internet
radio station, Pandora One. And once again, Nakai-san
knocked it out of the park! Up until now, RWB had
been a bit of a secret, an underground tuner that made cars that looked like '90s
race cars for the street. Things were about to change for Nakai. It was this exposure, plus
another unforeseen factor that would bring RAUH-Welt
BEGRIFF to the world stage. (cymbals ting)
Chapter four, (typewriter tapping)
the Akira Nakai experience. Now around the mid to late-2000's, the value of air-cooled
Porsches dropped drastically. Now, you can barely find a
good 911 for under $50,000, but then they could be
bought for dirt cheap. What like 1,500, 2,500 bucks? What are we talking here? No, more like a 15, 25,000... We need to work on your
definition of cheap, my friend. (logo reverberates) - [Narrator] Up To Speed. - You guys remember on HiLow
when you started a club? Boost Creeps! Well now, I'm so excited
that I can finally rep my set
(bell chimes) with this Boost Creeps sticker pack. (upbeat music) So go to donutmedia.com
to get yourself some. You might've noticed
that I have it on a car that doesn't even have a turbo. That's because you don't need
a turbo to be a Boost Creep, you just gotta have heart because heart is the turbo of the body. The brain is the engine,
the feet are the tires, butthole's the exhaust. (logo reverberates) - [Narrator] Up To Speed. - My point is the people that
would never be able to buy these cars suddenly could
afford to buy these cars and some of those people
were my kinda people. The kinda people that
wanted a race car-looking, wide-boy Porsche. JPEGs and .MOVs of the white Hoonigan 911 and green Pandora One
became hugely popular as they were shared across
car forums and blogs and eventually social media. Younger enthusiasts who had
grown up with the JDM cars of the '90s, a.k.a. most of us, loved the look of these cars. But the first time I saw an RWB Porsche was on Speedhunters and I was like, "what the frigging frig is that?" I knew that there were
gonna be a bunch of guys who did not like this
and that made me love it because pissing off guys like
my dad has just, you know, kinda been my go-to my entire life. But there was one group
that absolutely hated RWBs, Porsche purists. Old, rich, mayonnaisey
guys denounced the work Nakai was doing to the dwindling
stock of air-cooled 911s. "Hide your air-cooled Porsches!" They protested. In their minds it was better to buy these classic sports cars
and keep them hidden away in a garage in fricking Rancho
Palos Verdes or something until they could see a
return on their investment, officially driving up the price, but in Nakai's mind, these
were cars that should be driven and raced and enjoyed,
and his modifications helped them drive better than ever, whether purists want to admit it or not. A widened wheelbase along
with super fat tires made these cars handle
better than the originals. Ask anyone who drives an RWB, it's an experience unlike any other. Speaking of experience,
we can't do a video on RWB without talking about
Nakai-san's modification process. You've probably seen a million
videos of this process, I know that I have, but
that doesn't take away from how amazing Nakai's skill
with a pneumatic air saw is. He lines it up with his eyes, marks it out and just starts cutting. Other people might take hours or even days to properly make sure that
their cuts are precise, but Nakai takes about 10 minutes. "I trust my eye and I cut", he says. Now you may have heard
in order to get Nakai to make you one of these cars, you need to provide a
carton of cigarettes, a case of Mexican Coke
and a leather armchair for the master to sit in. Now, that's all been blown way
out of proportion apparently. In reality those are just
things that Nakai likes. If you wanna get 'em, then
that's called being nice. So as there's been so many
videos about his process, like this one from Poisoned Studio, this legend just kept getting perpetuated. He doesn't require any of
those things to be there when he starts working, but if you're hosting him, you might wanna give Nakai
things that make him happy, and those things are Cokes and smokes. Another myth is that
Nakai does what he wants to your Porsche and you don't have a say. In reality, he's open to most things, but you don't really pay for
an RWB to not get an RWB. You can basically get
whatever you want now, just listen to my good
friend, Rutledge Wood, on this really, really
poorly filmed self-tape. - Don't make fun of my
camera work, all right? I'm doing the best I
can, I'm on an iPhone. What's up, Donut, it's
your bro, Rutledge Wood. Pardon my hair y'all, quarantine
hair is pretty serious. This is my RWB. I was so excited that you
guys asked me to show it off, so this is it. It started life as a 1986
Carrera, had the 3.2 in there. We pulled the 3.2 out, sold
that, called Summit Racing, got a 525 horse LS3
that we put in the back, ordered the kit and
everything from Japan... The way that he builds everything is that you have a conversation with him, which is exactly like,
"tell me what you want? "How do you want to build this?" We made this look like a '73
RSR, was kind of our goal. 9Eleven headlights, Lee
made these incredible bi-LED headlights. I did these custom Forgeline wheels, which have a centerlock on 'em. Big Brembo brakes behind
there, KW suspension... I assume this is what
y'all wanna see though? This is the Summit Racing, GM performance 525 horse crate motor LS3. It's got MagnaFlow headers on there, which are pointed towards
the front of the car and then Richard Waitas from MagnaFlow built this awesome bi-modal exhaust. Typically the waiting list
ends up being about a year, the parts get sent to
you, all the body parts, and you paint them and the
car and then Nakai shows up and he assembles the whole car
in front of you in two days. And Nakai showed up with
his suitcase of tools, and in like four minutes had cut 70% of this fiberglass piece off and had already mounted the light in what would've taken me days, like he's just that connected with a car. It was such a cool thing to be a part of. I love this sort of
community that RWB has made. The process was wild and it
felt like it took a long time in some areas and in other
times that two-day build went by like that,
(fingers click) but I know that I have
a one-of-one bespoke car that's mine forever and it's insane. If you checked out the build video we did, it's on YouTube, it's
also on my Instagram, for me the coolest part was I used to play with cars like this when I
was a kid with Hot Wheels and now I own a real life Hot Wheels car. Big thanks to all the RWB USA family that made it happen, Mark Arcenal, Scotto for putting it in
"0-60" back in the day, and ultimately Nakai-san too. I can't believe this
is my car, it's crazy. Donut, thanks for having
me, I love you guys. - RWB has influenced a new
generation of render artists who take the world widebody
to an insane level, but Nakai was the first to be like, "guys, this is possible." So now that they're not the most offbeat car builds out there, what does the future
have in store for RWB? (cymbals ting)
Chapter five, (typewriter tapping)
RAUH-Welt future. After their initial success in the 2010s and the subsequent controversy
surrounding their builds, car enthusiasts around the
globe have come to agree that the cars RW modifies
are fricking sick. And I say cars because
they're not just Porsches. RWB has branched off
from 930s, 964s and 993s to build a few Mercedes and an old Beetle, and a new Beetle from
our friend Tanner Foust. (jazz music) After all Porsches are just
Beetles with two more cylinders. RWB cars have appeared in video games like "Need for Speed" and "CSR 2". RWB races are now held regularly in Japan named after the fake tire
company that Nakai spray paints on all RWB builds, "Idlers". Yes, that is a fake company,
but it's cool as hell. I love that he made up
a fake tire company. And Nakai-san rarely misses a race. You might find him there in his new build, a ridiculous widebody 993 named Rotana, with an insane double
wing and a big ol' turbo hanging out the back. The RAUH-Welt crew is busier than ever. Nowadays, they're building
40 to 50 cars a year, most within a weekend. Some people might find them polarizing, but the wait list to
get one of these built is over a year long, so some people have to
love 'em, I love 'em. These cars were built
because one quiet guy who loves Porsches wanted his
car to look cool and go fast and that's what they've
been doing ever since. Thanks Nakai, and thank you
guys for watching this episode of Up To Speed, I hope we
got all the info right, I know I didn't say all the words right. This episode is sponsored by
our friends at REC Watches, they have a really cool co-lab
with RWB going on right now. You get one of two watches, both based on Nakai's personal 911s, and both of 'em have a piece
of those cars inside of 'em, they're really, really cool. This one is based on Rotana,
you can see it's purple, and if this is your first
Donut video, welcome aboard. If this is your first car
video, welcome aboard, hit that subscribe button if you liked it and that notification bell, I love you.
