Over Rev! is a manga created by Katsumi Yamaguchi and Team39, which was serialized in Weekly Young Sunday from 1996 to 2004 and compiled into 31 volumes. It tells the story of Ryoko Shino, a Japanese high school senior who gets into street racing. She used to be the best at track and field in school but during a race she tore her Achilles tendon, ending her dreams of being a track star. The manga goes over how she finds her new passion in life—street racing. It is unusual in the genre in that the central characters are mostly female. As she gets more involved she makes friends and grows as a person.
A live-action adaptation of the manga was released in 2001.
This show provides examples of:
- Badass Driver: The characters are either this or comic relief. Notably, it's Sawako's status as this, even drifting like a pro after only one week of getting her license, that gets Ryoko into learning how to become one herself.
- Best Her to Bed Her: The legend of the "speed of sound beautiful girl".
- Butt-Monkey: Takuro Aso, the brown bullet. He's also the worst driver among the cast.
- Car Porn: It can get fairly technical about cars and driving techniques.
- Contrived Coincidence: Sari Tachibana almost collides with Sawako when fleeing a Love Hotel with Takeo (Sawako's crush) in the passenger seat.
- Cool Car: Ryoko's Toyota MR2 may have been pulled off a scrapheap, but it's cool to her.
- Driving Stick: Ryoko's first time driving has her trying to overcome the fact that Sawako's car is a standard. The latter is more than willing to help the former out in learning. Unfortunately it comes at the cost of the car being driven into the bay by accident and both women being chewed out by Sawako's boyfriend.
- Ethical Slut: Sawako is a good person, but her private life . . .
- Gas Siphoning: It's done to the cars at the scrapyard Ryoko works at. She uses the gas for her car.
- Gossip Evolution: The out of control rumors about the "speed of sound beautiful girl" cause a lot of the trouble for the female racers.
- History Repeats: It's revealed in Chapter 4 that Ryoko's first time driving reminds her boyfriend Takao about how he met Sawako and how she was also unlicensed when she started driving.
- It's All My Fault: Downplayed after Ryoko drives Sawako's car into the harbour. The latter admits that the situation is mostly on her doing for encouraging Ryoko into doing the drift in the first place.
- Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Not in the traditional way, but Ryoko drives a sports car while Toru has a cute practical city car.
- Rice Burner: One story arc deals with the "Stock Car Wolf," an aspiring auto engineer who was obsessed with his father's "perfect" designs to the point that when his car was stolen and vandalized into a rice burner, he turned into a Knight Templar who challenged owners of modded cars to race against his stock model, with the stipulation that if (when) they lost, their cars would be taken and stripped of their mods. It takes losing to a "super stock" car - one that has been "modded" with subtle improvements to the original parts (in reality, restoring the original vision of the car engineers, before the marketing department messed up the specs) - to make him see reason.
- Unlucky Childhood Friend: Toru has trouble coping when his crush is more interested in cars than him.
- Women Drivers: Inverted. Female street racers have to be very good indeed to be taken seriously and the bad drivers in the series are male. Sawako's driving skills and Ryoko noticing her are what kicks off the series' plot.
- Wrench Wench: Ryoko eventually becomes capable of swapping out her car engine after it gets destroyed during a race.