I am pleased to announce the global availability of our ‘Digital Preservation Project’, the new NDF Attack Machine Archive – available to download now on Android and iOS.
For years, I’ve photographed and written about Japanese time attack cars. When I look for information on machines from the 1990s and early 2000s, I often find dead links, missing photos, and fragments of their histories scattered across old sites and magazines. Sometimes it is virtually impossible to find historical information on older builds, or even current information on active machines. For the cars currently competing that do have published information, we have no guarantee that finding information on them won’t be just as difficult to research ten, twenty or thirty years from today if we leave their records in those same places. I created the NDF Archive to keep the cars, drivers, shops, specifications, lap times, and development history together in one place that people can still use long after the cars have left the circuit.
The idea began with the material I already had: photographs, event articles, old features, results, and conversations with the people who built and drove these cars. Turning that into an app has meant going back through Japanese and English sources, mostly from NDF itself, and comparing specifications from different points in a car’s life, checking lap times, and writing profiles that explain how the builds developed. Some details take a surprising amount of time to confirm. I would rather leave a field open than fill it with a guess or inaccurate information. Each entry is input manually into an ACF field directly embedded into this website. Some entries take 30 minutes to an hour, and some take the better part of a day. This project started towards the beginning of the year and has grown slowly to its public release now.
The app brings those records together in individual machine profiles. Each entry can include the driver and supporting shop, engine and drivetrain, suspension, brakes, wheels and tires, aero, circuit times, and build history. You can browse the Tsukuba rankings, search and filter by manufacturer, status, or induction type, see recent updates, or use Random Machine to find a car you might have missed. The rankings are an easy way to begin to explore the archive for those not familiar with our living on-site ranking page, but the accurate search function can give you specific access to the cars and the people behind them. The machine cards contain the most recent modification list for active builds, and the last known spec for those that are retired.
This first public version is a foundation for what I’d like the Archive to eventually become. I will continue to add machines and revisiting existing entries as new records and better source material become available. A profile may change when a new specification is verified or a more complete account of its history comes to light. If you built, drove, supported, or photographed one of these cars and have something that belongs in its record, please reach out using the links inside the app.
I also have more planned features for the feature. A gallery carousel would let each profile show more of a machine’s different configurations over time, and direct links to our related articles would connect the concise app entry with the longer stories and photography on the site. Further ahead, I’m considering a separate, one-time paid offline edition with machine data and photos stored on the device. That concept makes the most sense once the archive is larger, around 200+ entries, giving the purchaser essentially an encyclopedia of time attack in Japan, accessible anywhere at any time. Think of it as a 20+ volume digital 80R series.
**Download NDF Archive:** [iPhone / App Store] · [Android / Google Play]
You can also search for ‘NDF Archive’ from your app store.
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