Andretti's Formula E cars turned up in Tokyo dressed as a 2 Fast 2 Furious Skyline
A livery built to detonate under floodlights
Formula E cars are spec machines, so nobody is bolting a Liberty Walk widebody onto one, and the rulebook has firm views on wheelarches with their own weather systems. What Wataru Kato has done instead is dress Andretti's two cars for the Tokyo ePrix in a wrap so loud it might as well have a bodykit. Mirror chrome, electric blue and kanji, timed for the series' first night race in the Japanese capital.
The look
The design is lifted from an R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R, with a mirrored silver-chrome base, bright blue accents and Japanese kanji. Anyone who grew up on 2 Fast 2 Furious will recognise the reference instantly, even though neither Liberty Walk nor Andretti has named the film. It sits on the Andretti Porsche 99X Electric Gen3 Evo cars of British Formula E champion Jake Dennis and series newcomer Felipe Drugovich.
Why chrome, why now
The chrome is not an accident. It debuts at the Tokyo ePrix at Tokyo Big Sight, where Formula E stages its first Japanese night race, and the reflective finish was chosen specifically to flare under the floodlights around Tokyo's neon-lit bay. A double-header at night is exactly the setting a mirror wrap is built for, which is the kind of detail that separates a good livery from a lucky one.
This one actually races
This is the important part: it is the real competition livery, not a display car. Dennis and Drugovich race in it across both Tokyo rounds, wearing bespoke Liberty Walk suits, and the entire crew switched to Liberty Walk kit for the weekend. For a tuner whose name is normally attached to riveted arches on parked show cars, having the work go wheel to wheel is a genuine first.
The man behind it
Liberty Walk founder Wataru Kato has spent years angle-grinding and body-kitting his way through everything from Ferrari F40s to Lamborghini Miuras, and more recently a Skyline for Lando Norris. Formula E is new ground for him, and to mark the collaboration the drivers arrived at Liberty Walk's Harajuku flagship in the tuner's own LB-E34 Super Silhouette, the body-kitted R34 that the race livery is drawn from.
It lands at a good moment for the series
The timing helps Formula E as much as Liberty Walk. The championship is unusually tight, with the top six covered by just 38 points and 58 available across Tokyo's two races alone, so one bad qualifying or one wall could reshape the standings before London. It also comes weeks after the Gen4 car ran at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where Dan Ticktum missed the Timed Shootout win by less than half a second, putting the series in front of a mainstream audience twice in a month.
AutoNext Take
This is the sort of thing Formula E should have been doing all along. The series has always struggled to feel like it belongs to car culture rather than to a boardroom, and handing two race cars to the most recognisable name in Japanese tuning, at a night race in Tokyo, in a livery every enthusiast recognises from a film, is a direct line into exactly the audience it needs. It costs the racing nothing and it reads as genuine rather than focus-grouped, which is harder to pull off than it looks. More of this, please.
