276! That's the highest number of rounds in boxing history, in England around the beginning of the 19th century. This was before the introduction of the Marquis of Queensberry rules, which imposed specific things like the structure of a fight and the wearing of boxing gloves amongst others. Sportsmanship is associated with abiding by such a code, bare-knuckle fighting and hitting a man when he is down was replaced by a (slightly) more humanized version of the sporting conflict. 276 is also the area code for southwest Virginia. If you go back to 1989 there was also a sporting kind of agreement made involving 276, the number referencing maximum horsepower for Japanese domestic-market cars and it was a gentlemen’s agreement. If you decide to make such an agreement yourself, it means you have made a non-binding informal agreement that is designed to make things fair in the chosen area. Either way, the rise of the JDM sports car with powerful 6-cylinder turbocharged engines necessitated regulation in some form to prevent a war. Like the one that happened with German cars and the regulation of cars’ top speed to 155mph.

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An Appetite For Horsemeat

Whether you played Gran Turismo or not, you will probably be familiar with the top Japanese sports cars of the 90s – the Toyota Supra, Nissan Skyline, Mazda RX-7, and Mitsubishi 3000GT amongst others. 3-liter engines were mostly popular in this part of the market - except for the RX-7, which used a smaller-capacity rotary engine, called a Wankel.

These cars are renowned for being highly tuneable and many made a name for themselves not just in circuit racing but also drifting and downhill touge. Official power outputs were pretty conservative, the motors in these cars unofficially producing more than on paper and more capable still. It’s very possible to find 1,000hp in a period JDM engine through modification, although by that time you might have voided your warranty of course. You can have a look at this video for proof but really, there are many others. The engines in these cars were very tuneable. Makes you wonder what you could do with the new Yaris Cross, a team of automotive engineers, and a turbo.

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The Gentlemen Have Spoken

Toyota Supra drift
Mulpix

The previously mentioned ‘276’ agreement was shaken upon and so sports cars came in with that official maximum power from the factory. It wasn’t called that, but it was meant to keep the power down below 280hp. It was hoped that in abating the horsepower cold-war, road safety would be improved and, on the streets, there might be a little less, well, hooliganry. To give credit to the gentlemen, whoever they were, cars were more or less kept around the maximum power figure but it wasn’t regulated or tested by an official entity. Hence the agreement character.

Many sports cars were anecdotally known for making north of 276, there are videos of dyno runs on YouTube showing up gentleman’s-agreement-breakers such as this Nissan Skyline R34. The Mk4 Toyota Supra made around 275hp in Japan and around 330hp in Europe and North America. The NSX-R from Honda also came out officially in Japan with 290hp, which must have gone down well at the gentlemen’s club at the time of its release, while the Honda Legend also made at least 300hp from its V12 engine. It’s almost universally agreed that few high-end sports cars from this era made the official power figure. A commonly quoted year that the agreement was nulled was around 2004.

A Rule-less Future Dystopia

Since the horses of Japanese cars have been free to flee the stables and gallop freely, we have seen some impressive power figures to immerge. Remember when the first Nissan GTR rolled out with 480hp and less than a decade later the Honda NSX with 100 more horses and 3 electric motors? With the agreement seemingly history and with easy power boosts thanks to hybrid or electric power there surely is a lot more to come too, with manufacturers pulling punches on the tarmac boxing ring. On a final note, isn’t anyone else curious as to how things could have looked back in the 90s with no restrictions in place at all, even if the cars themselves usually made more power under the agreement, with no such pact and a focus on power, we could have seen monstrous outputs as standard. Even before the tuning crowd got their spanners to work.