My History

Way back last century (well ok, it was 1999…), my wife and I quit our jobs and went to Japan to teach English, although my main motive for going was to bring a car back with me when we were finished! After about 6 months overseas, I’d had enough of public transport, and went to a car auction with another Australian, who was based in Osaka and buying cars for businesses in Australia, the UK, Canada and a number of other countries. Although I never did find myself a car that day, I got a call back from that same export company asking me if I’d like a job as a buying agent, beginning the following week. On the outside, it looked like the perfect job for a car nut like me, so I jumped at it.

Let me tell you that working as an export agent is far less glamourous than it looks. I worked 70-hour + weeks, with the occasional 20-hour day thrown in for good measure. The majority of the time at auctions was spent going out in all weather conditions to check the vehicles – there’s nothing like wiping snow off a windscreen to check a car’s auction number! Admittedly, most of the auctions are now on-line, but the fussiest buyers will still check every car they buy “in the metal” before they bid.

During our time in Japan, we managed to bring back four cars – A Eunos Cosmo 20B Type E-CCS (a dream car of mine - I'm an old rotorhead from waaay back!), two MX-5s (one for my wife and one for my Dad), and a 1998 Galant VR-4 manual, for my fun car. Again, while this looks glamourous, the amount of red tape we had to cut through to get them all into the country was incredible. See at the bottom of this page for car pics.

Having bought cars for my mates while I was there, I had learnt the system for importing cars very well, and upon our return to Australia, I was keen to continue importing for other friends, who continued to ask me to help them out. By about 2003, I was doing a car every couple of months, just for my mates, but this soon began to snowball, because they told their mates, and so on. As my bills started to rise, I realised I’d need to start charging people, and thanks to the support of on-line forums such as Fast Fours, nissansilvia.com and others, the number of interested buyers continued to grow.

By mid-2006, it had reached a point where I could turn what was once a hobby into a fully-fledged business, and at the end of 2007 I resigned from teaching so I could run the business full-time. Importing cars is a real passion for me, and I'm very blessed to be able to make a living from doing what I love.

Iron Chef Imports? What kind of stoopid name is that?

(Sorry, just watched a bit of "Back To The Future II" before writing this, for those who didn’t pick the reference above!) My original forum username on on-line car forums was “vrfour”, but once my Galant VR-4 was sold, it didn’t make much sense.

I’ve always loved the show “Iron Chef” which is screened on SBS on a Saturday night, a Japanese program which features a guest chef taking on the resident Iron Chef in a battle to impress the tastebuds of the esteemed judges. It only ran for a few years and was axed, probably due to the exorbitant production costs (most from buying all the ingredients!), so it has subsequently had enough re-runs to rival “Seinfeld”. Anyway, so I selected my new username, “Iron Chef”, as a tribute to the show, and the business spawned its name from there. I have often thought about changing it to something more sensible, but now that people associate my username with the business, it's a bit crazy to go changing it.

So, what car are you driving, Chef?

You'd think that, given the nature of my business, I'd be turning over cars every week, but I actually don't chop and change too much. Believe it or not, our family transporter is a Ford Territory which we bought new back when I was a teacher, and my wife loves it because I don't get any urges to modify it (although there was a turbo kit that was very tempting...). I've currently got a manual JZX100 Chaser as my daily driver at the moment - the 1JZ is an incredibly addictive motor! Having said that, the urge to buy a series 8 RX-7 was too great, so the Chaser will be on the market soon to make way for it. Look for a pic of the Chaser at the bottom of the page.

When I’m not importing cars or teaching, I’m the head judge for Drift Australia (so for those of you into drifting, come up and say hello when DA rolls up to a track near you in 2008). It’s a pretty tough gig at times, but being flown around Australia to watch our country’s best drifters is still an awesome privilege. I’ve been a huge drift fan since watching the locals slide in Japan when we were there (and this was before D1 even existed!) and have been involved in the sport locally for a number of years now. Keep your eyes peeled for some Iron Chef sponsorship this year!

Image of this handsome fellow in action courtesy of Michael Coppola Photographics

Some car pics...

An MX-5 is a car that everyone should own in their lifetime, firstly because they're convertible, secondly because they have the world's best gearshift, and thirdly, because they're a lesson in how a sports car can be perfectly matched to its suspension without having silly amounts of horsepower. Here are the two we brought back from Japan.

The Eunos Cosmo is still a very rare car, both in Japan and Australia. This one had the optional Mazdaspeed bodykit with a glowing Cosmo logo in the sideskirts! This dodgy pic was taken with one of the first digital cameras available on the market, back when I first bought it in Japan. The guy who bought it off me painted it bright yellow and it featured in a number of car shows and magazines.

The Galant VR-4 was my reward for all my hard work in Japan when we lived there! Very weird experience driving the same car in 2 different countries. When it came back to Australia in 2000, it was the only one here, and no-one knew what it was. I later sold it to a young bloke in Sydney, and later, I applied for them to be eligible under SEVS, so now there are plenty of them coming in to the country, as you'll see in my stock list. For obvious reasons, I still have a real soft spot for them!

This pic is for all the Pulsar nuts - we traded the green MX-5 in on our first-born child (and as a new-born baby, we occasionally thought trading back was quite a tempting option!) and then bought the Pulsar as a more "family friendly" car for my wife. It looked great and went relatively hard thanks to the SR20DE. The novelty of driving diagonally through every spoon drain and speed hump soon wore very thin with my wife, and we eventually sold it to buy the Territory we use now for our family truckster. As a result of owning this car, I hooked up with the Pulsar crazies at Pulsar Group Australia, and I then applied for the 3-door N15 Pulsar VZ-Rs, Autech Pulsars and VZ-R N1s to be eligible under SEVS, so expect to see a few more of these around in Australia too.