History
My first car was a Toyota 700 just like this one.
It had two outstanding features.
The first was the front bench seat which was held in by two butterfly nuts so at the Drive-In the seat was out quick smart and placed in front of the car for me or my mates, one of whom would emerge from the boot as soon as we parked.
It also made for a whole lot leg room if I was there with one of my lady dates,
Show over? Back in and secured in under a minute !
The second outstanding feature was its 700cc air-cooled 2 cylinder horizontally opposed engine.
This little 20kw (approx) gem was good for an impressive 60mph (100kph) flat out.
You'd get to that, floor the clutch in, cruise till it dropped back to 57mph and then go again. Awesome!!
Unless of course you persisted in this mode for more than 10 minutes, as I once did when I was racing my brother in his 3.6Litre Falcon 500.
Then a vague knocking noise would begin to manifest.
A steady increase in volume was accompanied by an equally steady decrease in top speed.
Luckily my Dad, a old school aircraft engineer was able to custom sculpt the new bearing inserts to pretty well perfectly fit the newly oval shaped big end journals!
It was a great little car.
