Toothless: The Hakone Edition GR86 That Meant Everything

It’s an honor to have friends visit from different parts of the country, and even from around the world. But when Nick Kingsley came from Arizona to Chicago, it was a total surprise.

Nick and I go back a couple of years, meeting in Las Vegas in 2024 when much of the RWB family came together, and Akira Nakai built RWB Shogun, the first U.S. 997 GT3, live at SEMA. We crossed paths at several West Coast events after that, and he later flew out to Chicago to build a Liberty Walk NSX for Fitment Industries.

For our latest meet-up, Nick was midway through a 3,000-mile road trip across the United States in his Toyota GR86. And not just any ZN8, either: a Hakone Edition wearing most of the HKS catalog. I knew we could create something special.

That night, an event was happening at our local coffee shop, Calibre Coffee, about 45 minutes outside the city. The Hakone made a noise I’d never heard from this chassis. The kit was custom, and the whistle sound it produces carries far. It’s how the car got its name: Toothless, after the dragon in How to Train Your Dragon. It sounds silly written, but in person it’s a menacing whistle that never really goes away.

Calibre was full of local drifters, so naturally the ZN6 and ZN8 owners flooded him with questions. Afterward, we took the car downtown.

The Chicago summer night was perfect. The wind was coming off the water, and we shot on one of the bascule bridges over the river. Later, we set up with the Sears Tower behind the car. And yes, it will always be the Sears Tower to me. Sorry, Willis.

But why a GR86 at all? Nick has spent most of his driving life in other people’s cars: Lamborghini Countachs and Diablos, Nissan GT-Rs, a McLaren Senna, a Ford GT40 – the sort of machinery most of us only read about. When it came time to find his own car, he needed something that would start every morning without any fuss. His father’s Toyota pickup had passed 300,000 miles and was still running. Of course it was. Nick never really entertained the first-generation cars. He wanted the refinement of the second generation, and at the time, used GR86s still commanded close to new-car money anyway. Another requirement: it had to be green.

That search led to the Hakone Edition, of which only 860 came to the United States.

From there, it was about the vision. Nick chose HKS for its history and the intent behind its products, then committed to a deliberate ’90s throwback: the era when you’d see a car built largely from one tuner’s catalog rather than assembled from numerous mismatched parts. The GR86 was being pieced together with the 2025 SEMA Show in mind.

The result: HKS Hipermax coilovers, turbo kit, oil cooler, blow-off valve, overpipe, Spec-L exhaust, and upgraded clutch. Adding Injector Dynamics ID1050X injectors and an EcuTek flex-fuel tune by Florez Tuning put it at around 450 wheel horsepower. The body wears the full HKS Type-S kit, including the carbon ducktail, wing, and front canards, plus a TOM’S front garnish and fender flares that Nick cut and trimmed himself to work with the HKS aero.

That last part matters, because Nick does paint and bodywork, a path he traces back to Nakai-san and the RWB Porsches that first pulled him into car culture. He freehanded HKS logos in metallic red to match the brake calipers. The black accents aren’t just black; they’re matched to Toyota’s factory black. The RAYS Volk Racing CE28Ns wear the factory Hakone wheel color, but in gloss where the originals were satin. Nothing shouts. As Nick puts it, you could almost walk into a showroom and buy it.

Cars mean more to us than we realize, especially when we’ve spent hundreds of hours making one our own. This one meant the world to Nick, and the reason is only partly the car. It was built over Thanksgiving weekend, three days, by a group of friends: Himself, Aaron, Denny, Nolan, and Austin. These are the same people who had gotten him through the worst stretch of his life not long before. Nick had been struggling and getting sober. In his words, they held him together with duct tape and superglue until he could start putting himself back together properly. Then he left Phoenix to clear his head. Somewhere out on the road, Nick fell back in love with a car he’d been ready to sell. It became his most prized possession.

Sadly, though, at the end of the trip in Naples, the car hit an oil slick, struck a curb, hit a tree, and went airborne, roughly 60 feet through the air at about 50mph. The roof caved in. There was no roll cage. Nick credits Toyota’s safety engineering with saving his life.

Now he wants to find another Hakone, and do it again, with the same friends who built the first one, and get it to SEMA. He hopes to display the totaled chassis beside its replacement, as a tribute to the original Toothless. 

Moments like this remind me why photography and videography matter. Those late nights shooting downtown are permanent now. A picture is worth a thousand words, and that shoot became one of the car’s last. Whenever Nick’s new GR86 debuts, I’ll be there to document it.