Wekfest SF 2012 Weekend Coverage…Part 1…
Man, what a weekend…
By now, I’ve become pretty accustomed to the way things work during the week of Wekfest San Francisco, but no matter what, it always manages to be quite the overwhelming experience. All I can really say to sum up the entire weekend was that it was just completely spectacular. The main difference with this year’s Wekfest event was that I was the most well-rested I have ever been. I’ve been going to these events long before it was even a Wek’Sos production and I’ve always been just drained going into the day of the show. This time around, I got everything done by the middle of the week and found some time to sleep. Even while we were all in Norcal during the weekend, I made it a point to not stay out too late. By that Sunday I’m usually walking around like a zombie with blood-shot eyes from lack of sleep and dry contact lenses. I’ll barely be able to make the drive back to the hotel and when I get back, I just crash out and don’t talk to anyone. It was almost the complete opposite this year though, as I changed my procrastinating ways and even showed up everywhere on time…if you know me, you know that I am notorious for being late. Hopefully entering my third decade of life, I can apply that to all aspects of my life so that I can be better rested and have more energy to do more things…
Another thing that I really wanted to change about previous years of being at Wekfest was managing my time hanging out with different groups of people. There are so many different friends from all over that come out for the show and I always regret not being able to spend time with everyone. It was virtually impossible because it didn’t seem like there were enough hours in the day to spend it with everyone in one single weekend. We have the usual Socal people that I love spending time with, and also the Norcal folks that I don’t ever get to see enough of. On top of that, we also had guys from the east coast/mid west making their way out and even the guys from Mayday Garage were going to be there. Luckily I was able to finish everything for the booth this year with time to spare so I didn’t have to spend too much time organizing it in the hotel room. This allowed me to have more free time to spend with others. I don’t know how it all came together, but we all managed to book rooms in the same hotel so I was able to see a lot of people by the time I got up for breakfast. There were some that I wish I could have hung out with more, but that’s just how it goes. It’s hard to really coordinate with so many others staying in different parts in the city but I think we all did a good job of hanging out. It seemed like everyone made a better effort this year. While we were in the city, it seemed like every time we stopped, more people were able to meet up and we had a big group of people from all over… In year’s past I’ve always had an amazing time in SF, but this time was definitely more diverse and I’m happy that I was able to see everyone and spend even a small moment to chat with them…
Now, as for the show itself…Wekfest San Francisco proved once again this year why it was the “mecca” of car shows in these last couple years. It was just bananas… I know a lot of people complained and many more couldn’t even get into the show because they were turned away, but that just shows you how big SF Wekfest has gotten. They outgrew the old parking structure and moved it to the Fort Mason/Herbst Pavilion, and easily outgrew that venue in just a year’s time. It’s tough guys, it really is. For everyone that complained about how crowded it was and how long the wait was, you have to understand that putting an event of this magnitude is an enormous amount of work and managing a crowd of that size is no easy feat. Just simply from being there in the morning to watching the entire roll-in process, organization improved by leaps and bounds. It was very well put together. I remember last year I was even a little annoyed by the roll-in process for vendors but I had zero issues this year. The main issue with using this venue is the people that run Fort Mason. They are incredibly strict and were not shy about making things inconvenient for everyone. There strict rules put a lot of pressure on everyone and they, along with the Fire Marshall, were the key reasons why the crowd was let into the show an hour late. You wanna know just how ridiculous certain things were? We were inside a large venue with hundreds of cars filled with gasoline (which isn’t an unusual thing for an indoor car show), and for whatever reason, I had to have a fucking smoke detector hanging from my canopy at my booth. It literally was tied and hanging to my canopy. If that wasn’t enough, I also had to have a fire extinguisher just to even have a fabric top on my canopy. I am not too familiar with how things work in San Francisco, but I have never set anything on fire selling stickers and t-shirts. If there was going to be a fire somewhere inside of the venue, believe me, my smoke detector wouldn’t have been much help in alerting me that there was a fire. In any case, the rules were ridiculous last year, and seemed to get more ridiculous this year. Whether or not they will use this venue again is unclear, but I don’t see it happening again, especially after how many people were told that they wouldn’t be able to get inside the show because it was at capacity. I heard people were turned away at 4pm because of the sheer number of people inside and they were upset. I too would be upset if I had waited in line for however many hours and then told I wouldn’t get in. That’s terrible, but I would also have tried to show up earlier, knowing how big Wekfest is every year…
It’s a shame that that many people couldn’t get in…it really is…Every year the organization is getting better and I am sure that the Wekfest staff is working hard on trying to alleviate the problems for the future. Over 10,000 people were at Wekfest, with the numbers maybe even reaching 14,000 maybe…you can’t please everybody. People have a right to be upset. But people also have to have a better understanding of how shows like this work. The Wekfest SF show has reached the levels of popularity that I haven’t seen since the old days of Hot Import Nights and Import Showoff. It took years for those shows to reach the point where they were a well-oiled machine and able to absorb that many people. Wekfest will get to that point, it just takes time. The hype around the event is just crazy right now. Hell, I don’t even understand how it got this big and I’ve been going to this show for how long now? Shit is just wild. If you didn’t get in this year, it sucks and I really hope you have a better time the next year if you plan on coming back. I wish I could sympathize with all of you but I have other things I need to worry about. I’ve been doing car show stuff for about ten years now and I would never wait in a line that long to get into a car show, and fuck, I LOVE car shows, haha…Best of luck to all of you who want to try again next year. It’s hard for me to gauge it and say that it’s worth waiting that long to get inside but my priorities are different. If you got the time and the patience, fuck, feel free…
I had a great time overall. I’m really happy that people were excited about the new shirts and the new merchandise. I didn’t go into it with any expectations but man, I was surprised by how much merchandise went out that day. I thank you for all of your continued support and it’s a great feeling knowing that you guys love The Chronicles. Stickers were going faster than ever and I ran out of a majority of shirts before the doors even opened that day. Thanks to Junior, Adam, and Ken for putting this event together and allowing me to be a part of it. These guys work their asses off and deserve all the success that is coming to them.
With that said, let’s get on with the coverage. If you are here to just see photos of cars, then you obviously are not a regular here on The Chronicles. I like to cover any and everything that is going on to give people an idea of what our experience is like overall. You can see photos of the cars at SF Wekfest EVERYWHERE. Everyone these days has a camera and is covering events like this. The way I am going to present it to you is more personal and like no other. This site has grown because of the idea of presenting the “lifestyle” to viewers throughout the world. Remember, it’s not about how many people are doing it…it’s how it is done that matters. Execution is everything. You want to see cars, scroll past everything else and look at just the cars or go to any other website to see car photos. You’ll see everything that goes on here, from the show, to behind-the-scenes, etc. Don’t like it? You’re welcome to leave, but buy a sticker first, haha…
Here we go…
The Wekfest SF weekend kicked off for many of us on Friday morning. If you saw last year’s coverage, we had a pretty large group of people to caravan with. This year was a little different… Some couldn’t make it this year, some were still putting their cars together, and some had babies so they couldn’t just up and leave right away. For the 2012 SF Wekfest road trip, May and I had just a couple of people to cruise with; Salem and Murdock in the J’s Racing Phaze2 TSX, Keith aka Keychain from It’s JDM Yo!!, Ms. Holly Lee, and a couple new friends in Jay Mayuga and his girlfriend, who apparently didn’t say a word all weekend, haha…
After meeting up for breakfast at Denny’s in the morning by Magic Mountain, we headed over to the Chevron across the freeway to gas up. I had to pick up an energy drink as well and buy tissues since I had a cold coming…why I needed a energy drink at 11am in the morning is a mystery but I probably purchased it by habit since I was usually going to bed around this time on a normal week day…
Jay Mayuga’s TSX with Modulo Voltage front bumper and Volk CE28s….Jay is also the only person who was down to blue tape his front end. Salem is Mr. Race Car guy now so his bumper is beat up anyways, and Keith apparently just didn’t give a shit… May and I rolled out in her Yaris. We didn’t blue tape shit because her car is so high that it usually does the job of kicking the rocks at everyone else…
Random thought but, it’s nice to know that even year’s after I sold my Accord, I can’t get away from them and they are still following me everywhere, haha…
Keith scratching his head and wondering how his freshly-painted lip kit is going to survive the streets of downtown San Francisco…
We got on the road and were overjoyed that there were no indications of rain…Last year, we drove through a storm and ended up taking the 101 north-bound all the way to San Francisco, which ended up taking us almost 9 hours…
We stopped at Kettleman City for a pee break and a stretch, then got back on the road immediately…
I didn’t take too many photos after that because there wasn’t anything very exciting about the drive. We got to our hotel around 5:30 or so in the evening and just relaxed for a bit before going out to dinner. There wasn’t any crazy pre-Wekfest private dinner party this year so we just rounded up whoever was in the city already and went out to grab drinks and eat. Those photos are actually on May’s camera so I’ll just toss-up those photos in part 2 tomorrow…
The next morning, we all got up early to eat breakfast downstairs in the hotel. One of the main reasons we stay at this particular hotel was because of the free breakfast. Most other places just offer simple fruits and maybe some travel-size cereal but this joint had everything…eggs, sausages, biscuits and gravy, bagels, etc…and all you can eat. It’s the best free meal of every day, haha…
Some of the homies from the other coast were up bright and early… Here’s S2kJay chillin with Widdy after breakfast in the patio area of the hotel…
Sloppy, Sam, and his girl Linh enjoying some free food…
Ryan, OldmanJames, Ray from ATS Garage, and DPK Darryl grubbing…Ray lives in Norcal and didn’t even stay at the hotel, but probably stops by the hotel to eat everyday because the people at the hotel don’t even pay attention…Actually, Darryl didn’t stay there either, haha…
After breakfast we all decided to meet up again and take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) aka a train down to the city to hang out. There were so many of us that it wasn’t even worth driving all the way down to the city and trying to find everyone so we all agreed to take the train and stay together…A couple of us had cars to show that weekend too and parking them in the streets of San Francisco is not something that anyone was down to do…
I hadn’t taken the BART in a couple of years so I forgot how to buy tickets and what not, but we figured it out with just a couple of minutes before the train arrived…
Ryan Der from ATS showing off his faux-camera iPhone case…
May doing her favorite activity, iPhone apps and Instagram…
Salem, who I am wishing the best for, since he was set to have surgery on his eye today, just a day after he returned home from Frisco…
Murdock doing what he does best…
Ryan “Rywire” Basseri was probably happy to have a moment to relax and is not trapped at the shop building engine harnesses…
Phil from ATS Garage hopped on the train a couple stops later and then we all got off the train on Powell St… it was pretty busy being that it was President’s Day weekend so happy shoppers were everywhere…
A couple of the guys wanted to check out the Ferrari store so we waited outside while Salem played around with the Ferrari FXX motorized toy outside…
May was just happy not to be doing car-related shit for a change… I know how much she likes to take the BART down to the city so it was good that we had the opportunity to take it again…
Outside of one of the stores, I spotted this guy across the street who was so fucked up off of muscle relaxers that he was falling asleep in the middle of the street…At one point he almost fell off of the sidewalk and into the street with cars approaching. I don’t know what this guy was doing but he was messed-up. Eventually he got halfway onto the street and then had to turn around to get his bags but before he could pick them up, he started dozing off and was just all over the place. We all stopped to see what was going to happen next but he eventually stumbled off so we moved onto Chinatown…
Ryan stopped for a photo op with the lions that stood guard at the gates of Chinatown San Francisco…
They had these cool bronze statues throughout Chinatown…this looked like a nice family gathering…
…nice until you see one of the statues playing a game of grab-ass…
Good to know that some Chinese guy decided to create this jade statue to honor the ancient Chinese sport of American football. I’m sure you guys know who Jeremy Lin is by now and how he’s been doing great things on the basketball court…well, here is his great great grandfather, Terrell “Sweet & Sour Fingers” Lin, who was the Michael Jordan of Chinese football. He lead the league in touchdown receptions and his team, the Beijing Fighting Communists, went undefeated for three straight seasons because nobody in China plays football and they were the only team. Lin was also the quarterback on his team and threw the ball to himself because nobody else was on his team. He retired after he realized that nobody in China plays football, EVER….
Only $10.99 for these apple bottom jeans featuring your favorite celebrities from the early 2000s…Nothing says “wear these jeans” then having Carmen Electra on your back pocket…
Chinatown still bearing decorations from Chinese New Year a week or two ago…
Deejay Murdock doing work…
The trolley system rolling through…
Our buddy Nick Caster arrived from Roseville in the afternoon with his CR-X and then took a cab down to Chinatown to meet up with us…
A piece from famed street graffiti artist Banksy on some random wall in Chinatown SF…He was down there not too long ago for the debut of his documentary and took to the streets early to knock out this piece. They even have a plastic cover over it to protect it…that’s when you know you’re doing big things…when you tag on a wall and steps are taken to preserve it…
One of the more interesting things beside the Banksy piece that we saw down in Chinatown were these crazy dragon knives/blades/swords…While I’ve never actually seen anyone try to rock these in a fight, I’m confident in saying that I’d run like I was on fire if someone chased after me with giant blades with dragon handles on them…
Elderly Chinese street musicians playing for by a busy intersection…
Sam and his girlfriend met up with us also and we decided to stop by a local Thai food spot to eat lunch…everything looked absolutely delicious and everything was also only 5 bucks a plate…
After eating, it was starting to get dark so we made the trek back to the BART station to head back to the hotel…
The train was pretty crowded by the evening but we managed to all get seats…
Sloppy dropped Sam and his girl off earlier in the day so he didn’t get to take the BART with us until our trip back to the hotel… Turns out that it was his first time ever being on it and he seemed pretty excited to experience it…
Speaking of Sam, it was his birthday on the day of Wekfest so his girl Linh had this cool birthday cake made for him…It’s a cake made to look like his Civic driving through the Golden Gate Bridge in SF…
We parted ways for the most part after we got back to the hotel. Salem and Murdock headed out to meet up with Junior from Wekfest at a local car meet, while the others bought alcohol and pre-gamed for the night. ATS Phil met up with them later that night to go party at a lounge in the city. May and I hung out in the room for a little bit before meeting up with Rodrez and his Fiancee’ for dinner. Not much excitement after that since we had to wake up early in the morning for the Wekfest show…
The morning of Wekfest, we got up early and got ready to head to the Fort Mason venue for vendor set-up. Rodrez didn’t have a booth this year but he wanted to roll to the event with us so he could cover the show before spectators got there. Breakfast was ready right around the time we got down to the lobby so we stopped to eat really quick. We weren’t in too much of a rush since I got back to the hotel early the night before and had the car loaded-up and ready to go…
On the drive to SF that Friday, Salem and I had joked around about putting the free hotel food in our pockets to bring to the show, so I thought it would be funny to put a couple sausage links into a styrofoam cup to give to him when he got there. The last sausage turtling-up out of the cup wasn’t planned but added to the randomness of having a cup of sausages, haha…
When I got to Fort Mason, I checked-in and drove right into the venue. There was no wait this year because they were much more organized….This 510 was one of the first cars I saw that morning rolling into the show…
I thought it was a little crazy to see people already waiting in line to get in, but I later found out that these guys had been camped out there since 1am in the morning….fucking crazy…That’s when you realize how big Wekfest has gotten, when people are camping out like they were waiting for a new shoe release or something…
Some of my favorite photos that I took last year at Wekfest were during the roll-in process so I was happy to have plenty of time to get more this year in-between setting up The Chronicles booth with May and Tony from It’s JDM Yo!!…
A wingless Subaru STI sitting on some red Volk TE37SL…
Adam from Wek’Sos giving some instructions to one of his staff members…
Junior directing the 510 to his parking space inside the show…
A boosted CR-X drag car making his way in…
DSR Loreto posted-up by his “Shark-teal” EK on new Volk TE37Vs…
R33 Skyline GT-R on Prodrive wheels…
Evos were represented very well at Wekfest SF 2012…
2GS on SSR Vienna Kreis wheels…
Subaru with Work Schwert SC4s…
I had no idea Mark with the white 4-door DB would be making the trip to Wekfest so it was a cool to see him pull-up….He made some more additions to his Integra like a front splitter…
…and a retro-fitted Mugen wing…
ATS Anh’s ITR with a brand new look….say goodbye to the BYS front bumper…
Here is Anh mounting a camera to his windshield… He had this nifty idea of doing a time lapse video during the event so it’ll be cool to see later what came of it…
I wanted to see what was going on in the other building so I walked over and saw Mark Arcenal’s Rauh Welt Porsche…
No new additions to the car itself…It looked about the same as it did during SEMA last year…
Not even sure if Mark was even there at the show but there were guys moving the car around while others set-up the Fatlace booth…
PG+K Moe and Bon made the trip out to Norcal…Here they are chatting it up with Rodrez in their brand new Chronicles Ver. IV tees…
I walked outside to see if anyone new popped-up and spotted DPK Slappy and Jay Powers in his CR-X…
Absolutely loved this Evo…Never really imagined how teal and brown would work together but for whatever reason, it does on this car…
Traveling all the way from Japan was Tetsuya Yamaguchi of USDM Jam-fame… Here he is chatting with Big Mike…
Lisa from ATS Garage and her always-clean Integra on Almight Grey Regas…
Her husband Jay and his timeless CR-X on SW388s…
Nick Caster debuted his new J’s Racing set-up on his CR-X…more on this later…
ATS AJ and his C-West Integra on mag blue Volk SE37K…
Closing it out for today with a quick snap of Rywire’s NSX…under-exposed but I thought it made for a cool shot…
That’s all for today folks, come back with WAY more. I shot about 650 photos at the show and am still in the process of going through all of it… Thanks for looking…
“So You Think You Can STANCE?” Coverage…Part 2 of 2…
Back now with the second half of It’s JDM Yo!!’s “So You Think You Can STANCE” event coverage, brought to you by The Chronicles. When we last left off, the competition had just started and people were gathered along the street and driveway to check out all the “action”. By “action”, I mean cars going up driveways slowly…haha. I know an event like this usually has it’s fair share of supporters, and also it’s share of people that just think that it is out right stupid. To be fair, it’s totally okay to think that it’s completely retarded because there is a growing number of enthusiasts within our vast community that is starting to dislike this whole “stance” movement. Any time you mention anything about low offset wheels and aggressive fitment, you will have a number of people that will detest the idea and show their disappointment with where the scene has shifted. The whole stance/hellaflush/fitment scene has become it’s own subculture now within the community and it doesn’t look to be going anywhere any time soon. It just goes with different people liking different things. There’s no definitive right or wrong because people don’t always like the same thing or share the same ideas as others. Being in the magazine industry opens my eyes to a lot of different styles of tuning and I’ve learned to appreciate them. I don’t necessarily have to agree or like what some enthusiasts are doing nowadays, but I also don’t have to always be vocal about it. If you don’t like the “stance” movement, just take a gander at the photos, read some of my stupid comments, and move on. This site isn’t solely devoted to wheel fitment and if you’ve been around for a lengthy-amount of time on The Chronicles, you know that I like to bring you a variety of things. Now let’s just move on with the photos and knock out part 2 of the “So You Think You Can STANCE?” coverage…if you want to read my thoughts on the event as a whole, I invite you to take a look back at part 1…
Now when we last left off, Milt had just kicked off the competition and did his run through the driveway…
He didn’t look like he had very many issues getting up the driveway…
…but coming down proved to be a little more interesting…
As I said in part 1, I don’t know the criteria for judging or what they were looking for, but on that particular run…Milt Salamanca garnered a score of 27 out of a possible 40…I didn’t even bother catching score after this because I really didn’t know what was going on. We all basically stood there to watch people potentially fuck their shit up…
A TSX narrowly missing the pavement as he was barely angling out…You can see Holly Lee and Tony from It’s JDM Yo!! standing in the middle of the driveway because they were basically the markers used to cut the driveway in half….Guy in the photo with the 49ers gear on is either whistling his favorite tune or over exaggerating his shock…
A strawberry-faced S14 240SX on Leon Hardiritt Ordens getting set to make his run….I thought the competition was a little unfair in that guys with aero or front lips already in need of repair competed against guys whose cars were in better condition…I mean, in terms of willingness to take a chance of breaking something to win, wouldn’t you have less to lose if your shit was already messed up already?…Then again, I don’t know how it was judged or scored so I can’t really say anything, just raising an interesting point….
People gradually started to get more into the event as more cars made their runs…Even Holly Lee was using the camera and trying to get some action shots…Tony for whatever reason, was showing off his hella hyphy THIZZ face circa 2006…
A clean white S2000 on CCW wheels stood next in line to make his attempt…
Antonio from Motormavens.com didn’t seem too impressed….Big Mike on the far left was taking a standing nap…
While I was happy to see that this S2K owner’s fenders weren’t fucked-up, his front lip has probably seen better days after this event…
Next up was the RHD CR-X from Infinit Wheels…
The CR-X’s run was one of the more interesting ones because they chose to drive the car straight up the driveway without angling at all and when it came down, it struggled to get traction and created some tire smoke…
Thanks to drifting, enthusiasts these days are conditioned to cheer and go ape shits anytime there is tire smoke so Infinit Wheels got some dap for creating the smoke show…
Armand with the TRD widebody MR-2 decided to participate/fuck his shit up…If anyone had anything to lose in this competition, it was him. His car is in pretty good condition and I don’t think damaging that kit would really be a good idea but he went for it anyway. During a test run, he mysteriously broke the wing off that he had just recently not replaced EVER, so this will be day 837 of wingless widebody SW20…
It didn’t look too bad as he was making his way down…
…but the more angles he had to make to get out, the more stress it was on his front end…if you look closely, you can see his fender cracking where it meets the sideskirt….
Next up was this S2000 with a CR lip and what looks like F-Zero Blue Volk CE28s…
If you ever wanted to know what a CR front lip would look like if it was driven into the ground with the weight of the car on it, here you go…
If that wasn’t enough scraping for you, here is a BB6 Prelude that also participated…Good to know that he had that plastic lip under his bumper to give the driveway more contact patch…haha…
This EF was one of the more ridiculous competitors of the day…not only was he making sparks under his car as he was exciting the driveway, he also was sparking when the car was driving normally on flat pavement. The guy decided to lower his car so extreme to the point where his car would flip over if he ran into a dime. The owner was also very serious about this competition and constantly asked later if he made it into the later rounds. Being low and fucking up the bottom of the car is serious business…
Last time I checked, IS350s weren’t cheap and neither are the parts made for them…Tell that to this guy’s front lip…
After most of the cars had finished their runs, out of nowhere, people decided to start acting like dipshits and revving their cars or driving really fast as they were leaving the venue to show off and/or mow people down who were spectating. Tony and many of us started to get kind of iffy about keeping the competition on an open street, so Tony and crew told everyone to get back inside where the parking lot was. The highlight of douchebaggery was when a 15 year old kid smoking a cigarette driving an STI his parents bought for him pulled in front of a crowd and started revving. Instead of just waiting for people to disperse, he felt it was a better idea to rev his shitty car at people and ask them to move. He was also accompanied by his other douchebag 15 year old friends who think that mounting two 25mm spacers on each wheel qualifies as “aggressive fitment”. The runner-up for master of douchebaggery was some jackass who was sitting on the passenger side window, hanging out of his car while his friend peeled out and hauled ass down the street. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Apparently these kids thought that they were participating in an event called “So You Think Your Parents Will Want to Visit You In The Hospital When You Are A Brain Dead VEGETABLE?”…
People acting like complete idiots sort of put a damper on the event, even though a majority of it went very well and without any real issues. There was a break during the competition to tally up the scores and see who would advance to the later rounds, but I was pretty set on going home. I had just driven back earlier that morning from my trip to Las Vegas so I wanted to get home to get some much needed rest. Before that though, I made the rounds and finished up the rest of my coverage of cars that were at the event…
Michael Mao’s Acura NSX…
G35 on DPE wheels…
A couple more shots of the Amuse-inspired S2000 from DTM Autobody…
…as well as the KE70 Corolla wagon parked behind it…
JonJon’s supercharged IS350 from Vanguard Collective/It’s JDM Yo!!….
Y34 M45 on air…
Oh this was cool…It’s virtually impossible to see a modified Lexus ES300/Toyota Windom EVER so it was refreshing to see one at the event with a kit and old school Work Equip mesh wheels…These cars are terribly unpopular to modify, because they are basically fancy versions of Camrys, but I’ll always have a soft spot for this car because my parents owned one when I was growing up…The last time I saw one of these ES300s modded was back around the early 2000s when I would spot the same one always cruising through LA. It had a HKS turbo kit and everything, shit was crazy and way ahead of it’s time…
Ryan Delosreyes’ Scion xB on old school Work VS wheels…
The Kouki S14 from part 1 with the crooked intercooler…As a whole, this car wouldn’t look bad if it was all one color…
FC3S RX-7 from the most un-intimidating car crew name ever, Nuisance…
Acura TSX from Low’N Slow on gold-faced CCW Classics…
3rd generation Toyota Celica from Low’N Slow…
Armand’s MR-2, post cracked fender…Aspiring breezies in the background doing hoodrat stuff…so hood that the guy photographing them is standing on the train tracks…
The BB6 Prelude on white-faced Work Equips that competed earlier…front lip scuffed up, but still intact…
The most aggressive S2000 ever to park in front of a dumpster…
Real clean EK with a iridescent hood shield…
Hubert Barnum male modeling on the Ruckus he and his brother built…
One more shot of the 350Z from part one on the SSR Gartmaier wheels…
The Barnum brothers’ Ruckus…draped in orange jizzum…
The IS350 that competed earlier on SSR MS1 wheels…
The S14 that also competed earlier…
DPK David’s EJ1 coupe just before he left…
Keith aka Keychain’s Accord sedan on polished MB Battles…
That’s about it…after that I left so I didn’t really get a chance to see who won the whole thing. I believed after things calmed down for a bit, they went back and finished the competition on the driveway where it started. Overall, a pretty successful event I would have to say…It wasn’t really meant to be anything taken too serious and I think that’s what people left with. At the end of the day, it’s just a couple guys showing off how they get out of driveways in their lowered cars. The meet portion of the event was cool. The diversity was good and wasn’t only limited to just beat-up cars on aggressively-fitted wheels. Congrats to Tony and staff for putting together a good event….
Thanks for looking… Back tomorrow with other stuff…
Oh before I go, I had to post this up. It was on Facebook late last night but I figured I’d post it up here since a lot of you don’t have Facebook accounts…
Haha, the expression on this guy’s face just made it too easy…
“So You Think You Can STANCE?” Coverage…Part 1…
Well this was different…haha. I mean, in terms of just being “different”, this event takes the cake so far. When Tony first came up with the idea to do this whole “Stance” competition, I was really up in the air about it. The whole name is something that we’ve been throwing around as a joke for the last year or so now, but when he decided to dub his event “So You Think You Can Stance?”, trust me, it was met with a collective “what the fuck are you thinking”. Tony is a pretty smart guy though with some pretty innovative ideas…he’s a massive pervert, but still, he is a smart pervert. If you don’t know which Tony I am referring to, I am talking about Tony from It’s JDM Yo!!. He’s always been a great friend and a huge supporter of mine so whenever he comes up with an idea, no matter how out of the box or random it is, I will support him….
Michael Mao’s Acura NSX on Volk CE28 Genesis…
The whole idea behind this “So You Think You Can Stance” event was very basic in principal…almost too basic. We were to have a pretty aggressively sloped driveway, in which people would sign-up and attempt to show everyone how they could go in and out of the driveway with their slammed/lowered/stanced-out vehicles. The original driveway that was chosen for the competition was over by the Rywire facility. It’s got a pretty big slant to it, but it wasn’t impossible to get up and down. DPK David takes his Civic coupe to work on occasion and has little issues getting in and out and even my Q45 aired down to about 40-50psi with a big kit and get out pretty easily. There are a number of cars that come through the shop and I’ve never really seen anyone have any problems. Being that the venue was also good enough to host a small meet though, Tony decided to use it for the event. What he would do would cone off a large chunk of the driveway, and as the competition progressed, the driveway would become smaller and smaller…
Linda’s Toyota Matrix on VIP Modular wheels from Team Praxis…
How it would be judged would also prove to be pretty interesting…There would be a panel of three guys who would determine the winner…Keith aka Keychain from It’s JDM Yo!!, Noel Barnum from Canibeat, and Yogi from Fatlace. These guys know about all things low so they would be good judges. Yogi I don’t think has ever really had a car that low..his Accord never moved and now he drives a Nissan pick-up, but still, he works for Fatlace/Illest so he encounters his fair share of lowered vehicles. I don’t know what was a point of emphasis for judging, nor do I know what they were looking at…I really didn’t want to know because then I would wonder if they were judging it correctly and with this being a first-time competition, there are a lot of unknowns. Even after the event has come and gone, I still have no real idea of how they judged this. There were so many different types of cars and they all went about going up and down the driveway different…it’s one of those things that can have real open interpretation. In the end, I believe a 1st generation Lexus GS300 won so congrats to the owner. I believe Falken Tires was a co-sponsor of the event and the winner got a set of tires. The other co-sponsor was VIP Modular wheels, which offered a significant discount (20-30% I believe) on a new set of VIP Modular wheels…
350Z on SSR Gartmaier wheels fro Royal Origin…
On the days leading up to the event, Tony realized that there was a chance that the event would be bigger than originally anticipated. I guess he had more than enough responses on social media outlets where he believed the event might be larger than the Rywire parking lot could hold, so he changed the venue entirely. Instead of having it at Rywire, he moved the event over to the city of Santa Fe Springs, inside an industrial section of the city that was quiet and had plenty of space on a Sunday. Overall, I think the event worked out great. The whole idea of it on paper just sounds kind of silly, but man, people fucking love all things “stance”. You can literally throw the word “stance” into any event name or website and there’s a high possibility of it being successful. As much as people love to talk shit about stanced-out cars, it’s become a genre in our community that has become quite popular. I’m a fan of everything as long as it’s done right in my eyes or in moderation. There are some absolutely ridiculous looking cars that showed-up… as with every stance-related event, there are often times when people just try way too fucking hard to be cool and somehow totally fuck up their cars in the process…
VIP Modular booth on display…
If you want my honest opinion of this event, I would kind of relate it to like pro-wrestling and figure skating, but without the excitement of wrestling and without the grace of figure skating…haha, if that makes any sense… I didn’t think that many people would be into the competition side of the event but damn, people were on edge after the first couple cars did their driveway sessions. I think many of us were skeptical but eventually we were also into it and wanted to know who was going to win. I knew that the meet portion of this event would be good because Tony’s events always have good turn-outs. He can bring a good crowd in just by blasting the event on Facebook. The competition was cool, but like I said early on, there’s a lot that needs to go into judging criteria if Tony and crew decide to put another event like this on again in the future…
Lowered cars going up driveways is something that every enthusiast has to go through practically everyday…turning it into a competition just sounds totally absurd…but you know what? It just works…haha. Congrats to Tony and the It’s JDM Yo!! crew for putting on another successful event…
Standard Functions brought out a couple of really nicely-built Ruckus’ for display at the Fatlace booth…
I spotted my favorite car early on in the day…DPK David and I were walking around while I did coverage and stumbled upon an AE86 on HRE wheels…
HREs are not a typical wheel that you see on an AE86…this one might be the first one ever actually…You don’t see these wheels on Corollas of any kind because they are often times worth more than the cars themselves. It’s a high end wheel that belongs on more appropriately high-end automobiles. Anytime you see something like this though, it’s definitely a cool sight…
Turns out that this beautiful creation is actually owned by Mickey Andrade who works at HRE. David and I were a little shocked at first to see a perfectly fit set of HREs on a Corolla but after speaking to him, it all made sense. The car itself was built by John Russakoff from JSPFab in Vista, CA…
John Russakoff’s claim to fame, besides being a talented drifter in Formula D, is performing S2000 F20C swaps on older Toyotas like the AE86. He has a whole kit that is made just for the swap and even has this custom made F20C spark plug wire covers with the Toyota 1600 insignia on them…pretty cool stuff…
I’ve seen this EK with purple Work Meister S1s various times before online…I believe it’s from Northern Cali…
The It’s JDM Yo!! booth with an assortment of the latest It’s JDM Yo!! gear…
The Z33 from above on SSR Gartmaier wheels…
Jay Borcena’s Acura TL on VIP Modular wheels and Accuair suspension…
The guys having a moment…(From left to right: Jay Borcena, Big Mike, Noel Barnum, DPK David, and Noel’s girl Emily…)
Ms. Sheila working the NOS Energy booth…
3GS on Auto Couture wheels…
A good-looking wingless Mitsubishi Evo X on concave Volk TE37s…
JonJon Usaha’s Job Design Lexus IS300 representing It’s JDM Yo/Vanguard Collective…
S2000 from Infinit Wheels sitting on CCWs…
2GS on Work Eurolines, also representing Infinit Wheels…
WRX rolling through with some aggressive blue Work Meister S1s…
Powerhouse Amuse-inspired Honda S2000 on Enkei PF01 from DTM Autobody…
Clean Boso-style Corolla wagon on really clean old school Super Advan Racing wheels…I dig the red interior on this thing…
Keychain cruising up to the event fashionably late…
Noel Barnum taking a seat on his Ruckus to check out the event…
I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why the intercooler on this S14 is cock-eyed…probably insert a “Because Drift Car” or something stupid here…
Antonio from Motormavens was in charge of MCing the event but also had his camera and massive lens on hand to do some coverage for his site…
This G35 on white-faced Work Meister S1 wheels was just stunning…Shows that you can have a clean set-up on aggressive wheels without making your shit look absurd with haggered fenders…
Yogi from Fatlace/Illest standing the in the middle of the street with a giant “Illest” flag…
A couple hours into the event, it was time to begin the competition and people got together by the driveway in anticipation…
Evo X on green Volk CE28s posted-up on the side of the street…
Here’s an incorrect way to be “stanced-out”….fake TEs, chewed up tires inside and out rocking two gigantic wheel spacers just to be “flush”…What is that shit, like 50mms wider now??…
Jimmy from Team Praxis rolling through before the competition started in his FJ Cruiser…
RHD CR-X from Infinit Wheels lined-up and ready to compete…
Milt from Low N Slow was the first car on hand to try his way up the driveway…he and his crew took the competition seriously and had their team flags and shit all up in Milt’s Z…
Milt’s license plate was a popular topic of mention at the event…
The judges and Antonio huddling-up and discussing the rules…
Milt and his Garson Deep Racing wheels ready to go…
…Judges ready…
…and….
…back tomorrow with part two of the “So You Think You Can Stance?” coverage!…
Stay tuned and thanks for looking!
Autocon 2011 Coverage…Part 4…The Conclusion…
Time to close out the Autocon 2011 coverage with a bang…Today we will be taking a look at the remaining cars of the event. I felt that Autocon was a great success and with a more knowledgeable and more organized staff, it’ll be even better in 2012. With that said, let’s get to the photos…
In case you missed the previous parts, here are the links that will take you them…
If Ly Say with the red TSX owned a Subaru STI, I imagine it would look exactly like this one from Royal Origin because they both share a similar color and wheel set-up…it’s definitely a good look…
Mazda 3 from Royal Origin on Rotiform TMBs…
Another Mazda 3 from Royal Origin, this one with Work Emitz wheels and fender flares…
Gerald Reyes’ Acura Integra on Work Equip 03…
Chivas’ sunburst orange EM1 on Sprint Hart CP-R…
White 2nd gen. IS on Junction Produce Scaras…
Keychain aka Keith from It’s JDM Yo!!! recently got his lip kit on his Accord sedan repainted and the car is looking fresh…
FG2 Civic coupe on Work Equips…
Instant Gentleman S14 coupe with MMR wheels…
Yellow 1st gen. Lexus IS on Rotiform NUE…
Black 2GS with way too much fitment…fenders just look absolutely haggered…fucking terrible looking…Just.Awful…
This LS430 on the other hand, looks exceptionally good…
S13 convertible on some AME Tracers with a gold roll bar and pink steering wheel…
Liked the cement grey tone on this BMW…
Liberty Walk Lamborghini Murcielago from Japan…
Brandon Burke’s slammed and static S13 coupe on SSR Professor SP1…
A pair of Subaru Legacy wagons…
Lloyd Morales’ Vertex-kitted Kouki S14 coupe…
Loved the color combo and the red overall on this Hyundai Genesis…They’re just great looking cars in general just slammed on some wheels…
White on black two-tone Chevy Camaro on Rotiform wheels…
Tjin Edition Ford Explorer….
Tjin Edition Chevy Camaro…
Tjin Edition Chevy Cruz…
Clean BB6 Prelude with gold Volk Racing CE28Ns…
Ranz Motorsports Mazda RX-4 with 2JZ-GE swap and retro-fitted Lexus IS300 dashboard… To read more on this wild RX-4, click here…. or here….
Ranz Motorsports 1st gen. Toyota Celica aka “The Dark Knight” featuring a Honda S2000 F20C powerplant…To read more about this build, click here….
Ernie’s timeless 1st gen. Acura Integra on classic SSR EX-C Neo…
Porsche Panamera representing Heavy Hitters on DPE wheels…
G-Power twin-supercharged yellow BMW M5 on HRE wheels aka “Sabine”…Many non-BMW guys like me don’t know much about this car but there’s actually quite a bit of extensive work done to this thing. Even the rear quarters have been widened but the lines are so subtle, it’s hard to notice…check out the build-thread here, trust me, it’s pretty sick…
Custom widebody BMW M5 by Ranz Motorsports aka “Gunther”….This Lamborghini-white M5 features a catalog of Radenergie parts and wheels and rocks 355-series tires in the rear…nuts…if you want more info on “Gunther”, peep it here…
Chevy Camaro with a Extreme Dimensions kit, Vortech-supercharged on USW forged wheels…didn’t even have to Google shit to figure that out like the Beemers above…haha…
Ryan Deguzman’s FD3S RX-7….
R-Rydes’ custom widebody G35 with Kenstyle aero, Vortech-supercharged, and 21-inch Modsport S1 3-piece forged wheels…
Varis-kitted EVO on AME Tracers…I think this might be the first time I’ve ever been to an event where there was more than one set of AME Tracers…One of the most slept on wheels EVER…
No idea who this is but I was more concerned with what the dude behind her was up to…just mildly creepy looking, that’s all…
FC3S RX-7 from the crew “Nuisance”…they were parked to some other crew that called themselves “Aminorannoyance”…
I really wanted to get a closer look at this EVO since it looked like it had a nice collection of parts on it, but I couldn’t get close enough since all the cars in this section were invading eachother’s personal space…
After Jamarri Whiteside from Auto Concept Elite defeated the Chrysler 300Camaro at “Ye Old Hot Import Nights in LA Conventionshire”, a new challenger appeared for the next duel, in the mystical purple form of a Chevy Malibu with a Cadillac CTS-V front end…The epic battle was Swift and Elite….in the end, I have no idea who won because it was cold as shit and I left early…
JonJon’s supercharged VIP IS350 on WED’s Kranze Vishunu…
One more shot of Michael Mao’s Acura NSX on TE37s…
…as well as another shot of Wilson’s Carlsson E-Class Benz on BBS wheels…
A couple more of Big Mike’s Prelude and its new look…
Andrew Lim’s beautifully-built Toyota Supra on DPE wheels…
Gonna close out the Autocon 2011 coverage with a shot of Alisa Ali Marie posing next to Andrew’s gold Supra…
Well, that’s about it…4 parts, over 200 photos,…it doesn’t get any more in-depth than that…Hope you guys enjoyed it… Thanks for looking. Make sure to check out the previous three parts if you missed them…
Autocon 2011 Coverage…Part 2….
Back now with part 2 of the Autocon 2011 coverage….today will be slightly different in that I plan to run more photos today than in part 1. I was in a bit of a rush yesterday so I didn’t get to put as many photos up as I planned but I’m about 95% finished with all the photos from the event and I have a better idea of how many I need to toss up per day to keep the different parts divided proportionally. The first half of it will continue to be like it was yesterday though and consist of random stuff that I observed during the day. I was hanging out at the booth with May and a couple others for a huge chunk of the day at Autocon 2011 and I didn’t plan on shooting until later on in the day. Reasoning behind this is because the sun was casting such a harsh light on the cars the whole day and everything would just look blown out in the coverage. Photos look better towards the end of the day when the sun is coming down anyway so if you’re looking for your car here, wait towards the end or wait until the following posts come. You’ll know when a majority of the car coverage is coming, believe me… Now, on with the photos from the first half of the day…
BEST. OPENING. PHOTO. EVER…Haha…while Autocon did feature some very well-built cars of all makes and models, there were a couple of these that were floating around…I mean, I’m not saying that “MUFASA 8″ is not built with the best of intentions and to the highest caliber, but it just doesn’t fit the style of the show, I guess you can say. The CR-X leaves a little bit more to be desired…especially considering the idea that the owner might be trying to fix his “Lambo” door and prevent it from slowly sliding downward and closing on it’s own…It’s just really odd to see him pull up with these other Dodge Chargers and what not…haha. It even had a Batman theme and the owner was wearing a Batman shirt… Imagine if every car had doors like this, Everybody would be opening their doors into each other and all their door dings would be on the bottom of the door, haha. That and if you tried to close your door at the same time as the guy next to you, the doors would like, scissor into each other and get stuck…
The only thing that’s really comparable to Batman is that they share similar facial expressions in this photo….haha…
Hot pink/magenta Infiniti G35 on gold-plated Leon Hardiritt Ordens from Import Fashion…
It’s JDM Yo!! had stacks on stacks on stacks of NOS Energy drinks to distribute, free of charge, to everyone at Autocon 2011…There were only two flavors available and not surprisingly, people complained about getting free shit and demanding other flavors…“Do you have the sugar free one?” No motherfucker, I don’t even know what flavors these are. I got purple and I got green, pick one. What do they taste like? Umm, it fucking taste purple and the other one tastes like GREEN…
Bryant Nguyen’s Acura TSX on SSR Professor SP3….
A pair of matching M3s on CCWs…
Really liked this yellow FD3s on bronze Volk Racing TE37s…Random but the owner that drives that Nissan Sentra next to him calls himself “The King”…He is the king of Nissan Sentras.
Mildly lowered Audi A3 on BBS CK wheels…sarcastic comment is sarcastic…
This MK2 VW Golf GTI had to be one of my favorite builds at Autocon 2011…I love the simplicity of it, the color, and the old school BBS mesh wheels…Also like the way he colored in the Falken logo on the tire. Great attention to minor details…
This isn’t supposed to be “Tiffany Blue” right?… Nicely assembled xB, I’m a fan, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken multiple photos of it…
A shot of JonJon’s WED’s Kranze Vishunu and his neo-chrome Endless brake calipers…
JonJon’s wheel invading his wheel well’s personal space…
What’s up copyright infringement? I actually attempted to go on “Hellaflushstuff.com” to see what it was all about and it wasn’t even a functioning site…that and this chick was lookin at me like I was crazy…Apparently when you’re hellaflushstuff, it means you need to have a Jumpman-style logo but the bitch ain’t dunking shit…She’s just flying through the air spread eagle…
Models from the model lounge section next to us were busy grabbing NOS drinks all day to give out to perverts…Somebody should tell this girl that she has a plexiglass sign with “It’s JDM Yo!!” stickers stuck to her head…
I was about to message Tony on Facebook to find out the name of this model for this caption, but when I got to his page, I saw her posting on his wall…Her name is Trinity Dang….I now know the purpose of Facebook…
My favorite Mercedes Benz from the SEMA 2011 show ended up coming down all the way from Norcal for this event and it ended up parking with us as well…I love everything about this build…
Big Mike, his beard, and Neil Tjin took a moment to exchange pleasantries….Meanwhile, horrified Batman can be heard screaming in the background: “They have an educational website about Urinary Tract Infections?!!”…
Big Mike’s new look featuring his Chargespeed front lip…We had a discussion about whether or not he should modify his bumpers in a way to delete the front turn signals and leave just an opening there…I said he shouldn’t but he seems pretty keen on the idea…
I am happy to see that he paint-matched his valve cover though…I normally don’t like color-matched valve covers, but in this case, it works…I don’t always drink beer either, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis…
Nitty Beat walking by the booth after grabbing some food from the food trucks outside…I’m sure that’s the same face he made later that night when he went home to SD to take a massive food truck dump…
The adult in me thinks that smoking is bad for you…the kid in me thinks that it’s funny that the tattoo on her arm says “Wang”…haha…her name is actually “Lily Zenna Wang” so the tat makes sense. I’m just giving her a shitty time because she didn’t have very nice things to say about the model lounge that Tony and crew set-up all morning and almost seemed demanding…
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to take a photo of Julie Mai at Autocon, but I did catch her tying this kid’s shoelace, which I and everyone around thought was pretty cool…it was cool until I seen this kid walking around to like 3-4 different models and getting them to tie his shoes…The dudes that this kid was with were walking around using him as a baiting chip to get girls to go over to their cars to take pictures…stay classy car enthusiast!..
OHH….are you guys ready to see Amy Fay like you’ve NEVER seen her before on the internet???? Well peep game…
Get ready because this is one of those rare, once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunities…
Here is the back of Amy Fay’s head. She’s on the right by the way…haha. Amy Fay was at the It’s JDM Yo!! booth with her signed posters and what not and she received quite the reception when she arrived… Guys were coming over left and right to take pictures of her. I am probably in a majority of them. I went to go get food at the Dogzilla food truck and when I got back, everyone was trying to get a picture of her. I on the other hand, wanted to enjoy my food so I just ate at the table behind her…So if you are looking at photos of her and you see an attractive asian dude eating a hot dog in the background, it’s me…
Another shot of Lily Zenna Wang…
Man, Autocon 2011 brought out a fine crop of creepy fucking perverts….This little guy was posted up in front of the model lounge area exactly how you see him in this photo for a good 20 minutes. He was doing his creepy thing and peeking over the table at the models and made the models super uncomfortable… Eventually, one of the models got so creeped out that she called one of the security guys to come over and they made him leave. He didn’t though and just stood up, walked to the other side of the lounge and stared at the girls some more…
On a lighter note, here’s some photos of Ela Pasion…
Here’s the same creepy pervert taking a picture with Ela…
Titla McBoob was in the house…good to see she’s getting work consistently at different events. I think she’s been at almost every major event this year…
Ms. Holly Lee doing her thing and who also later won the Autocon 2011 Spokesmodel Search Award…
Cara Skye, who I committed an epic photo bomb on at HIN, chuckin the deuce up for me in this photo…
Big Mike chatting with Robert Chew from Falken Tire and his girlfriend Yuri…Robert did not want to be photographed, haha…
Norman and Sloppy from AS1…
DPK David and Preston Dawson from Function&Form Autolife…
Pretty fucking random shot of Jamarri Whiteside’s purple SSR Professor SP3 wheel…Didn’t know it had stickers on the lip….
Gabby Jeanne modeling for Auto Concept Elite…
I liked this shot of DPK David’s front wheel…
…also liked his new Skunk2 low-profile valve cover hardware…
Christine Vu liked it so much she ripped the bottom half of her shirt off…
Thanks to Sunny from Franklin Autobody for providing heel-safe paint…
At this point, I hung out at the booth for a while and put my camera away. Maybe an hour or so passed when the sun was about to set and that’s when I set out on a mission to walk the entire show and get as many cars that caught my eye as I possibly could. It was a race against the sun but I’m happy with how the photos came out…
Bryant Nguyen’s Acura TSX once again, on SSR Professor SP3s….
Ly Say’s beautifully done Acura TSX on Work Meister S1Rs….
Lexus 2GS on some newly released Work VS-MS wheels…
Christian Ruvalcaba’s “El Smurf” Civic coupe…I didn’t name it that…
Jackson Wong from DTM Autobody’s S2000 on black Enkei PF01…
1GS from Platinum VIP with a Job Design kit that was originally meant for a Lexus LS I believe…
Love this LS430 on WED’s Kranze Bazreias…
Celica that came up all the way from Mexico…It has nothing to do with what geographic location he’s from but I don’t believe those are real Work Meister S1s…
370Z with Powerhouse Amuse kit from Ar-Kan…
Preston Olson’s 350Z on VIP Modular wheels…
Autofashion USA’s new 2GS project car…coming along nicely…
Scion tC also reppin’ Autofashion USA, on Leon Hardiritt Ordens…
It’s nice to see M45s done up nicely with proper wheel fitment…
Big Steve had his LS400 teleported from his mansion in Dubai to represent at Autocon 2011…this would have been a better photo if his camel wasn’t casting a shadow on his car…
Another 2GS, this one on polished Ordens…
Many of you probably don’t know or care, but I sold my AME Shallen AX wheels a couple months back and they ended up on this 3GS…looks good and I want to say I miss these wheels, but I haven’t even put my new wheels on yet so I’m not sure if I even like them, haha…
Closing it out for today with this Dodge Challenger, designed, built, and owned by none other than Jon Sibal…check out his blog here since I still get consistent hits from his site to this very day…We have a lot in common. He’s a artist like me…the only difference is that he’s actually good at what he does and gets paid for it, while I’m busy occupying my time by having delusions of grandeur…
That’s all for today…back with more tomorrow…now off to Rywire to gawk at his Integra…
Autocon 2011 Coverage…Part 1….
Damn…I took a lot of photos at this event. I’d hope to be done going through all of them by now but there’s still a gigantic chunk of it in my memory card that I have yet to touch. I know many of you have come on here the last couple days since the event to see coverage so let’s just go ahead and kick it off today. I’m going into this not really knowing how many parts there will be, but it’ll definitely be more than just 2-3 parts. How I ended up taking that many photos I don’t know, but I think I did a pretty good job of covering the event. Obviously there is some stuff I missed but seeing as how I had a booth at this show, I think you will get a pretty good idea of how this show was…
Now my thoughts on the event…Hmm…I know many of you have already heard about the lack of organization and how the roll-in process was anything less than “hassle-free”. It probably was, I don’t really know because I got there early and set-up right away. A lot of people came by to the booth and brought it up to me, probably in hopes that I would mention it when I posted up the coverage. For all intents and purposes, shit, I have to say right now that it was a great event. I didn’t go last year because I made other plans, but I don’t think missing out on the 2010 Autocon show had any effect on how I felt about this year’s. Foot traffic was great, there was a diverse crowd of cars,…I don’t know, it looked to me as if it went well. If this was an event that I was putting on I’d be pretty happy with it. Okay, roll-in was probably a pain and I did notice how it was kind of unorganized, but you almost have to expect it with guys that are fairly new to putting on events like these. It was definitely under-staffed, but that can be alleviated pretty easily by just hiring more people. Organization just comes with better planning, and as time progresses, I think Justin Fong and staff will get better at it with time. It’s okay to bitch about it as long as you understand that it’s not something that can’t be fixed. I had a good time and it seemed as if everyone else did too.
There were some pretty beat ass looking cars that I don’t think should have been there but I don’t believe there was a screening process so it’s not like you can prevent people from PAYING YOU to show up, you know what I mean? Autocon is off to a good start….will it continue to get better? I would certainly hope so. Will they ever be as big as Wekfest and the other top tier shows of this current generation? Ehh, I don’t know if I want that to happen. I’m cool with the success and all but isn’t this show designed to be for a good cause? Justin originally put on this event as a simultaneously running toy drive. People bring in toys and gifts for children that are less fortunate during the holiday season. If this does turn into a major event, do they just continue to do toy drives at every location they go to, even if it’s not during the holidays? And if they don’t do they just move on as a major car show, leaving behind the original intent of the show itself? It’s kind of a grey area… I mean, if they abandon the whole Toys for Tots things, it would seem as if they used it as a stepping stone to move on and expand the Autocon name, and that doesn’t seem right at all…I don’t know….For now, I think we should all just be happy that this event was a success and everyone there enjoyed it. I also liked the idea of having all the food trucks outside the whole day. That I know for sure took some careful planning and it helped that people didn’t have to be there all day without food or eating some crappy, dry, convention center food…
Anyways, let’s move onto the coverage. Today we will be taking a look at the roll-in early that Saturday. I wouldn’t know about how painful roll-in was because I got there early and went in with It’s JDM Yo!!! Tony. If anything, if it was pain-free for me because I didn’t have to wait long and I took the spare time I had and shot photos…There are a lot of random photos mixed in with the cars because I had a booth and I tried not to leave it after it was set-up. Everything that you are seeing in the first couple parts are just things that happened around me and stuff I could capture from a distance….Enjoy… If you don’t like it, go log onto some other blog where they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about and have no comprehension of sentence structure…
We rolled out early in the morning and got there around 7:30am. I had no idea where It’s JDM Yo!! Tony was so I just pulled my camera out and started shooting until he came and got us…This yellow BMW M5 on HREs was one of the first cars I spotted…
First generation Toyota Celica waiting in line to roll-in…
You can see here how the R35 GT-R dwarfs the original Mini Cooper….
Evo X on CCW Classics…
I’m a big fan of the Powerhouse Amuse kit on the 370Zs…I liked how this owner added the black on the sideskirts to add some contrast and also to match the black lines of the front…
BMW E46 M3 on CCW Classics…I’m not gonna lie, Autocon 2011 was probably the only show other than Import Alliance this year where I saw this many sets of CCWs…Most of them were found on BMWs too, which was really interesting because I never thought CCWs were that popular in the BMW community….
Big Mike used Autocon 2011 as a platform to officially debut his new look…You haven’t seen his car at various meets/shows lately because he’s been busy getting his Chargespeed lip molded to his front bumper, color-matching his mirrors, and getting his wheels powdercoated a high gloss black…
I eventually found Tony…he was busy going over the floorplan with one of the Autocon staffers with Freddie from Autofashion and we rolled into the venue soon-after…
Once we got inside, we waited to see where they wanted our booths to be set-up so I continued shooting…
Ryan Deguzman’s FD3s RX-7 cruising in…
DPK David posted up next to my crappy 4Runner…
The guns and DTA theme I get…what I don’t understand is why you would put crappy Varrstoen wheels on a Porsche…and I don’t really give a shit about the sponsorship argument either…
Buddy Club Honda Fit show/sometimes track car…
Andrew Lim’s DPE S20 wheels on his gold Toyota Supra…
Matte red BMW 5-series wagon from VIP Modular wheels…
S2000 on teal BBS LMs…
TSX on mag blue Volk Racing RE30s…
Another shot of the BMW wagon next to Team Praxis Jimmy’s FJ Cruiser…
Nimbus Grey BMW on custom bronze BBS LM…
We checked the weather forecast early that morning before we left and it showed that it was going to be a pretty cold day… May was all dressed in her winter gear but then we arrived to the venue and the sun started to beat down and it was actually getting pretty warm…
VIP Y34 Infiniti M45…
Another shot of the M3 on Classics…the one parked directly next to it looked almost identical to this one…
Stanced-out DB Integra on some black steel wheels…
Ly Say’s Acura TSX on Work S1R…
Jamarri Whiteside’s award-winning Subaru STI from Auto Concept Elite… This build just won “Best of Show” at Hot Import Nights just a week prior to Autocon 2011…
Auto Concept Elite’s ENEOS-themed widebody R35 GT-R…
Big Mike’s Scion xB…haha…just playing, but they share a similar tone…
Justin and Autocon had advertised that there were free hot-air balloon rides that day and sure enough, there was…
Man, I fucking loved this Toyota Tundra on Volk TE37s…That truck couldn’t look any better…
Scion xB on air and BBS wheels…
Big Mike prepping his Prelude…
Slammed Lexus SC300 from Royal Origin (I think…)….
Chivas rolled out from Vegas with his orange EM1…I just recently finished a story on this coupe for a future Honda Tuning feature so keep an eye out for that…
Gerald’s DC2 Integra on Work Equip 03s….also from Las Vegas…
DPK David all set-up and ready for the show…
JonJon was still busy prepping his IS300…
Step-lipped multi-piece Mugen M7s…
Jamarri Whiteside cleaning the door jams on his STI…check out the door panels on this thing…
Gonna close it out today with a couple shots of Michael Mao’s Acura NSX on aggressive Volk TE37s…
Back with much more tomorrow!! Gotta run for now…
Thanks for looking…
Exclusive Content…The Bisimoto Engineering 2012 Honda Civic SEMA Build Revealed…
As you should all know by now, the annual SEMA show kicks off this week which will serve as the grand unveiling to many of the industry’s latest and greatest automotive projects. It’s probably one of the most anticipated of the year and many aftermarket tuning companies save their best work for this event. One of the companies that brings out their absolute best to Las Vegas every single year is Bisimoto Engineering. Last year, I had the pleasure of unveiling their 400+hp fully-functional hybrid Honda CR-Z project to the world and this year, or today rather, I have the esteemed honor of revealing their 2012 Honda Civic coupe build. This build, in my opinion, is possibly their best yet. During the build-up, I told Bisi Ezerioha that this has to be his best-looking car yet….I was a little premature in my praise of course, because while I still believe this is his best-looking build yet, I had not had a chance to see the dyno numbers and how much power the new K24z7 produced. This car is absolutely insane. I’ll leave you with a bit of suspense until you can see the horsepower numbers for yourself on the Dyna-Pak screenshot below. What he’s been able to squeeze out of this K-motor is pretty crazy…just hearing it start-up was intense enough…
I was lucky enough to be able to cover more of this build than last year’s Bisimoto CR-Z project. In fact, by the time I saw the CR-Z, it was probably at about 85-90% completion. This year, I was able to see the 2012 Civic from the point in which it was completely stripped down, all the way until the final moment of re-assembly and right when it was loaded on to the trailer and sent off to Honda of America. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to cover every single moment of it, but I’ll tell you this, I spent a couple sleepless nights over there snapping away with the camera while also lending a hand wherever I could to help Bisi and crew finish up the car. The time table was definitely tight on this one but I feel that this 2012 Civic will undoubtedly be a hit at the 2011 SEMA show. What I love about this year’s build is that Bisi also touched on the aesthetics of the car, something that isn’t always a focal point of his builds. Overall, it’s just a very aggressive looking build and it definitely has the guts to back it up….
I have to thank Bisimoto Engineering and Rywire.com for giving me the ability to be present during the build process. It’s a great feeling to be able to unveil such a huge project to the world today. For those of you who will be able to participate in the SEMA festivities, please stop by the Honda section in the main hall to check out this build for yourself. For those of you who aren’t able to go to SEMA, you guys are in for a real treat today. I am going to put up photos and video today from the point in which I first saw the car in raw form to the moment it went back to Honda for shipment to Las Vegas….
I would have liked to have been able to do a more traditional “shoot” like I did last year with the Bisimoto CR-Z but we just ran out of time this year. Luckily I was able to cover more of the intricacies of the build and you get a chance to see the process instead of just the final product. With that said, I would like to formally announce the first official photos of the 2012 Bisimoto Honda Civic coupe….enjoy and if you’re new here, I hope you stick around…
Note – There are quite a bit of photos so please allow them to load…I would have separated them into sections but since I am currently away in Las Vegas, I don’t know if I will have the ability to upload different parts throughout the week…
This is the state in which the 2012 Honda Civic was in at around 1am on October 20th, 2011…The only visually complete items on the car were the Stop-Tech big brakes, cut-out hood, and full roll cage…
Ryan Basseri from Rywire creating custom brake lines for the Civic…
Bisi Ezerioha, Supertwinz John from AEM, and Ryan Basseri going over some ideas for the engine bay…
I was thinking that Bisi would go with his signature Bisimoto Fighter Special wheel since a couple of them were either mounted on the car or around it, but that wasn’t the case because he had a new wheel to debut on the Civic…
At this point, the exterior was still basically stock, other than the cut-out on the hood…
A look at the cage that was built by Steen Chassis…
Stop-Tech big brake kit…a small wheel spacer was needed to clear the caliper…
Ryan doing work…
Supertwinz John holding up the Burns Stainless short muffler that will eventually go on the Civic…
Ryan under the car working on the custom lines for the rear brakes…
The lines running to a Wilwood proportioning valve…
Bisi and Ryan going over the brake lines….
Bisi swept a little…
This next batch of photos were captured 3 days later. By this point, the motor had gone back into the car, the vehicle wrap was complete, and re-assembly had begun…
First look at the K24Z7 since going back into the coupe…
One of the most noticeable additions that I spotted right away were the AEM High Output Ignition Coils….Definitely didn’t expect Bisi to go back to using a more conventional, external coil over the O.E. coil-over-plug set-up…
I did however, expect to see this massive Turbonetics turbo…
Custom relay and harness set-up built from scratch by Rywire…
Cool little addition that Bisi had found off of an airplane…I forget what it’s used for now but Ryan actually rewired this thing and made it functional…
Ryan working on the fuse box….
Your first look at the graphical livery and vinyl wrap layout. You can see here that the chute has been installed and the new wheels mounted…
How the engine bay looked before the radiator support and everything was reinstalled…
Your first look at the Bisimoto “Eins Gramm” wheel…
Ryan and Bisi working on the engine harness…
Ryan installing the Odyssey battery beneath the headlight…
The K24Z7 engine coming together…
I didn’t get a chance to stay very long that day… I just wanted to stop by for a bit and check out the progress… The next batch of photos came another 3 days later, on 10/26/2011, just 5 days before SEMA. The car had to go back to Honda of America for press photos and what not, so there was definitely a sense of urgency to finish. The 2012 Civic actually had to be delivered the next morning so Bisi and crew stayed up for a couple days to knock it out…I had pulled an all-nighter for work and other reasons, but I had to make the drive out to Ontario to see this build through to the end…
Random shot of one of Bisi’s Porsche projects sitting outside next to his trailer…
When I got there, Bisi was busy on his laptop configuring the Racepak dash display while two representatives from Extreme Dimensions were busy installing some carbon fiber pieces from their “Carbon Creations” line of products…
In the days that I was away, the car was actually sent out to Bisi’s fabricators for more stuff, including this custom rear wing…
Guys from Extreme Dimensions installing the carbon fiber half-splitter pieces/canards or whatever you call those things…
I forget the exact specs on the wheels right now, but I’m sure wheel fitment and “stance” guys will appreciate it. I think this had to be the first time where Bisi ever had to worry about wheel fitment. There are only so many suspension components out for the 2012 Civics at this point so messing with the camber adjustments and what not was definitely interesting…We eventually where able to get the wheels to fit without that little area of the rear bumper being pushed out slightly…
The “Eins Gramm” logo on the wheel which means, easily enough, “One Gram”…
The engine bay with the radiator, core support, and front mount intercooler re-installed…
At one point in the afternoon, we stopped to eat lunch since Bisi had ordered pizza, and it was great to see a photo of Misa Campo hanging inside the Bisimoto offices after staring at car parts and dudes all day…haha…
After we finished eating and chatting for a bit, it was back to work. I took the time to get some more detail shots of the Bisimoto Civic coupe…
A closer look at the custom vents on his drag wing…
Bisimoto-themed custom graphical livery…
Better look at the AEM High Voltage “Smart” ignition coils mounted to a plate on the Golden Eagle intake manifold…
The massive Turbonetics turbocharger…
Okay, so speaking of the giant turbo, Bisi had tuned the K24Z7 motor earlier on in the day and revealed to us the final numbers from his tune…
There were still some very minor issues that will need to be resolved once SEMA comes to a conclusion but your eyes aren’t deceiving you…the Bisimoto Engineering 2012 Honda Civic produced 1004 horsepower and 623LB-Ft of torque… One-thousand and four horsepower K24!…
A shot of the front bumper…
A shot of the rear of the Civic….
Bisi Ezerioha putting some of his vinyl decals on to support his many sponsors…
Big Mike helped with the rear window decals…
A shot of the cockpit with the custom airplane “launch” switches…
Almost complete…Below is a video of one of the start-ups so you guys can get a chance to hear the motor….
Corner of the front bumper featuring another batch of sponsors….
Vibrant Vanjen clamps…
Golden Eagle Pro Series fuel rail…
All hands on board to help!…
The Turbonetics unit in motion…
Ryan going over some last minute details in the bay…
A final look at the Bisimoto Eins Gramm wheel on Falken Azenis…
Bisi applying the “BISIMOTO.COM” banner to signify it’s completion…
Below is a video of the 2012 Civic making it’s way out of the facility for the first time and getting onto a trailer for SEMA…
See you at SEMA 2011!…
That’s a wrap…if you guys are going to be attending the SEMA 2011 show, make sure to stop by the Honda section and check out the 1000+ horsepower Bisimoto Engineering 2012 Honda Civic. Remember where you guys saw it first….www.stickydiljoe.com!!!
I apologize for not being able to get better shots of the Civic outside of the facility, there just wasn’t any time. Below is a link to a larger sized photo so you can have a better view of what the car looks like…
Thanks for looking, and thank you to Bisimoto Engineering for the opportunity!!
See me in Vegas, I’m outta here!!! I will definitely try to update whenever I get the chance!
“Race Day” at Racer’s Edge Indoor Karting Coverage…
While there was actual racing going on over in Fontana, CA. at the IDRC International Finals, I was over in the city of Burbank for “Race Day”. There was certainly racing going on over here as well, but of the go-kart racing variety. This small show/meet was held inside the compound of an indoor kart racing facility known as “Racer’s Edge”. Norman, who is also the head of local Socal car crew AS1, set-up this entire event and all the homies as well as other fellow enthusiasts came out to show their support. The lot didn’t seem very large but they were still able to squeeze in a pretty large amount of vehicles. Norman and crew had expected more cars and were planning to use every possible open space to fill it with a car but the fire marshall notified them that they wouldn’t be able to house as many cars as they could due to fire code. It certainly didn’t have too big of an effect on the show though because there was a very good mix of different builds present. Hondas, Nissans, Subarus, you name it, there was probably one in attendance. There were even some very nice old school rides present, which is always a pleasant surprise. One of the coolest things about this show was that people were also able to go karting inside for a discounted rate. Being able to race and watch others race inside also provided shade from the intense heat outside. I don’t really know what’s going on with this weather, especially in mid-late October. There’s no reason why it should be getting this hot. All in all, it was a good show. Big Mike, DPK David, and some of the other homies ended up spending a lot of their time there judging the non-Honda categories and some of the other guys showed up just to hang out. May and I arrived around 2pm and I began snapping away at whatever I saw…enjoy the photos and thanks to Norman for organizing this event…
This was one of the first cars I spotted when I got to the show…Pretty cool looking MK5 GTI on air and Bentley wheels…Kinda liked this photo so I included a Larger Version (1200×800)
Integras were abundant at “Race Day”…
I thought this MX-5 Miata on TE37s was interesting…
Classic look for a DC2…R front end conversion, R wing, Spoon SW388s…
Another good looking DC2…this one with clear housing JDM Integra headlights, front end, and Mugen MF10Ls….
Always been a big fan of this 4-door Integra…I like the simplicity of it and the contrast of the red Bride interior on the white…
The engine bay is very traditional…no crazy tuck or shave or anything…still retains ABS, air conditioning, stock battery location, etc…
Very nice interior…
Teddy’s white EK with his newly-mounted First Molding front lip…
This coupe was pretty clean…the engine bay is pretty random and I can’t say I’m really a big fan of that whole style but I can appreciate the amount of labor involved in creating it…
The bay was so busy I almost didn’t notice the ITBs…
This Corolla was really clean…I didn’t get a chance to see what was under the hood but the outside looked pretty mint. Even the Watanabe wheels looked like they were brand new straight out of the box and on the car with original center caps and everything…
Another AE86, this one on SSR Longchamps…
Here’s another old school Corolla…this chassis is the one that preceded the AE86 chassis….
Loved this RPS13 hatchback on SSR Professor SP3s and Top Secret aero…
Sil80 on SSR Professor SP1s…
Legacy Wagon on Blitz Technospeed Z1…it was so hot that the tires were sweating, haha…
Sloppy aka TGIJoseph’s Honda Fit on Spoon wheels…
Clean Subaru STI on polished Volk CE28s…
White EG Civic on what looks to be Mugen sideskirts (could be Wings West), and Spoon Sports-style front lip….949 wheels with caps also and Recaro seats…
4-door Civic on Mugen NR10s…the name of the front lip escapes me right now, but I think it might be a Vision-style carbon fiber EG9 Ferio lip…
This was tucked away in the corner at the show but I thought it was a good look. The blue on blue is not that common with Subaru-owners and it doesn’t hurt that the wheels are aggressively sized Work Meister S1s…
Spotted this RSX at various events in the past…
FA5 Civic on Yokohama Super Advan Racing Ver. 2 wheels…
I walked inside to the karting area and spotted Salem from Phaze 2′s TSX parked inside the track…pretty cool but with the way some of these kids were driving, I would have been a little worried…
One of the interesting things to note about this event was that Racer’s Edge had a separate building inside the parking lot that made it possible for Norman to park some cars inside of and out of the sun. While this was cool for the people inside because they could escape the burning sun, it made for crappier photos…
Here’s a Civic that I’ve been keep an eye on. It has a cool, track-inspired look and the guy actually takes it to the track…It just needs to be painted and it’ll look like a completely different car…
DPK David’s EJ1 coupe…
DPK JP’s Civic…
Crappy photo of Arn’s Integra…looks like he parked next to the fucking sun or something…
Phaze2 Arnel’s 4-door with the lip kit paint-matched….this thing is starting to look better and better…
AS1 Karl’s EM1 Civic on CCWs…
A “photoshoot” that was going on in the middle of the show with one of the girls that was working the Race Day event…
Jose Romo’s Audi A3…
This was pretty interesting/random…authentic right hand drive Datsun Bluebird that was tucked away in the back corner…
Mugen CR-X Pro.2 from GSpot Automotive…
Brian Arias’ Civic that was featured this year in Import Tuner magazine…
Civic from GTS Auto that you should all be pretty familiar with by now…
Arn brought his wife and baby out to hang out at the show for a bit before it ended…this little guy always looks like he’s surprised, haha…
Leon also brought his newborn baby out for the first time…it’s still pretty crazy to think that Leon is a dad now…
Chaba was working the event inside the karting area throughout the day but found some time to come out and hold Leon’s baby… On most other sites, you will see her doing poses and modeling at events at what not…on The Chronicles…YOU WILL SEE HER HOLDING A BABY. Haha…this ain’t “It’sJDMYo!!!” We got models holding babies over here…
Anyways, it was nearing the end of the day so it was time for the awards to be presented…
Norman, the man behind the event, holding up one of the awards…he also does his fair share of holding babies because he’s a father of 12…
DPK David won “Best Honda” and Chaba was happy for him…
DPK JP won “Best Honda without headlights”/”People’s Choice”….
A bunch of other awards were given out too but there was already a photographer on hand to cover that so I just sat back and didn’t do shit the rest of the time…oh I clapped…that should be mentioned I guess…
Group photo with the award winners…Arnel actually won “Best Stance” but he was nowhere to be found so David is holding up the award for him. He was either smoking a cigarette or not caring, or something related to not standing there at that moment…Congrats to all the winners though, smokers or not…
That’s pretty much it. YEAR.THREE is this weekend! Get your cars some what in presentable condition!…
Thanks for looking….
The Top 10 Hondas of 2010…A retrospective…Part 2…
Back now with the second half of the Top 10 Hondas of 2010 retrospective…Yesterday we took a look back at spots 10-6 of the Top Ten and today we will be looking at the other 5 spots on the list. One interesting note to consider when I was putting yesterdays and today’s list is that there seems to be less change with the 2010 group in comparison to the Top Ten Hondas of year’s past. I don’t know what it is, maybe because these builds are in more of a completed state than the others but either way, as a whole, you don’t see very much of a difference. There are minor changes here and there but the guys on the 2010 list seem to be the types that hold onto their cars and aren’t in any rush to build something completely new. Of the guys from 2010, there’s just one person who has sold their car and moved on. You can maybe consider RC Chacon’s new project as him moving on, but he actually still has his white EG and I’m sure he’s planning on rebuilding it…
Moving on…
5. JDMYard/Yonas Liu’s “EGK24A”…
What he’s up to now: You’ll be very happier to hear that Yonas is still very active with his Civic build. While he probably has one of the most recognizable Civics in all of the world today, Yonas tends to keep to himself mostly and only posts occasionally on forums like NWP4Life. Thankfully, we have social media outlets that allow us to keep in contact with people like Yonas Liu who are on the other half of the world. I’ve been chatting with Yonas recently on Facebook and he’s been updating me on all the new things he’s been doing to his Civic. It’s good to know that after all these years of him owning his car and all the abuse that he puts it through that he is still excited to try new things with it and making his build better than ever…
He sent me a photo the other day actually of his latest major modification. It was a decent photo from his Blackberry or something and I was going to post it, but I promised him that I would hold off until next week to show everyone, since he’s planning on some major unveiling some time around the 10th of October. It’s a very drastic change from what he’s been running in the last couple years and I think you guys will be just as surprised as I am when you see it. For now, take a look at Speedhunters’ feature on Yonas’ EG which actually dropped today…
“GOLIATH, MEET DAVID” – via Speedhunters.com
4. Chris Sakai’s Civic/Angel Ramos’ S2000 (Tie)
What he’s up to now: Chris Sakai has taken a more subtle approach with the aesthetics of his Civic in 2011. After his cover feature in Honda Tuning and landing on the Top 10 Hondas list, he kicked off 2011 by ditching his wing, hood, and mirrors. OEM Civic Type R pieces make their way back onto Chris’ car now and he also went with a different set of wheels…
I wasn’t sure how the white Regas would look when I found out about the switch but when I saw it, I honestly felt that it was probably one of his Civic’s best looks yet. Other than those aesthetic changes, not much else has changed. Chris has continued to participate in all the major Cali car show events and picked up a couple new sponsors here and there… The car looks so good in it’s current state that there isn’t really any reason for him to have to do anything else to it…
What he’s up to now: In 2011, Angel Ramos has gone with the old adage; “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Other than a new set of brakes and a different set of Volks, Angel’s S2000 has remained exactly the same. There isn’t a whole lot he can do to it without having to tear down and start over. His S2000 has a very unique look and continues to stand out in the deep S2000 community…
I spoke to him for a while at this year’s Nisei Showoff and he does have one more major overhaul coming for his S2000. 2010 was the debut of Angel’s build and there was so much going on that I think he’s taken a step back this year so that he could breathe and just enjoy the fruits of his labor. There are definitely some big things that he plans to do to this thing but the ideas are still very premature. It’ll be interesting to see what actually happens to Angel’s S2000 but all we can do now is wait until next year…
3. ATS*Anh’s Acura Integra Type R…
What he’s up to now: Anh Truong has probably been the most active in the top 5 in terms of adding new stuff to his build… His ITR probably hasn’t even been in his possession much in 2011 because it’s spent a chunk of it’s time either down here in Southern California for events or over at ASC Speed Metal for custom fabrication…
Anh’s car has been down at ASC because they have been hard at work on fabricating some new catch cans and misc. things for his engine bay. They also added a custom roll bar/half cage to the ITR. I think as a whole in 2011, I probably have seen Anh’s ITR more than I have seen Anh himself… The exterior of the ITR has remained basically the same, with the exception of some brand new Almighty Grey Regamaster EVOs…
2. Bisimoto’s Honda Civic Wagon and Honda CR-Z…
What he’s up to now: Bisi currently is hard at work on a brand new 2012 Honda Civic coupe for SEMA. The wagon is exactly the same as it was last year and for the most part, so is the turbo CR-Z. Bisi is a mad man so he’s constantly hard at work on either his own projects or tuning customer vehicles but the spare moments that he’s had, he’s spent it cruising around in the CR-Z. I was just over at the Bisimoto facility last week and he was talking about how often he drives the CR-Z. If you’re wondering, the answer is “yes”, he does drive it around with the chute in the rear and everything, haha…
There are some minor kinks electronically here and there with the hybrid motor but he has taken the car out for test runs at the track. I doubt he really has any major changes planned for this thing because he’ll be busy finishing his 2012 Civic and campaigning it for 2012. Another thing that might prevent him for doing anything else to this CR-Z is all the different Porsche projects he’s working on. I haven’t had a chance to see his Porsche SEMA project but he promises that it’ll be one-of-a-kind. I don’t know how he has enough hours in the day to do as much as he does but I’m very interested to see the debuts of his new projects when the SEMA show rolls around in November…
1. Ryan Der’s Honda Civic and Big Mike’s Honda Prelude (Tie)…
What he’s up to now: Ryan surprised a lot of people in 2011 when he decided to take off his complete C-West aero kit. He usually takes it off to track the Civic anyways and with so many track events to go to this year, I guess it just made sense for him to remove it permanently and go back to a Mugen front lip and splitter. At the Wekfest event that occurred in early 2011, Ryan also debuted a new set of custom refinished Work Meister S1s..
There aren’t any other major changes. Under the hood he’s switched over to a C.O.P. ignition system and different valve cover but that’s mostly it. He spent much of the year attending car shows as well as beating up his Civic on the track at events such as Super Street’s annual FF Battle….
What he’s up to now: Big Mike is always busy running around all over the place but his Prelude is pretty much the same as it was in 2010. There aren’t very many builds that are as in-depth or as detailed as his and it showed in 2011 when he consistently continued to take home awards at shows all over Cali. His Prelude even appeared on the cover of Banzai magazine, which is a U.K.-based publication. There are many that are starting to think that he needs to switch things up because it’s remained the same for the last two years and Big Mike definitely has some cool new things coming for his Prelude.
While he’s busy working and collecting new parts for his Prelude, Big Mike has started on a Honda Accord side-project to keep him occupied for the rest of the year. 2012 looks to be another big year for Big Mike, so stay tuned…
That rounds out the list. Hopefully this has given you some insight as to what these guys are up to these days. All are very much deserving of being on the 2010 list and continue to be a force within the Honda community in 2011…
The only question that remains now is… who is going to make this year’s list?….
Thanks for looking…
Productivity…
I normally don’t get more than one or two things done on an average day because I’m too busy doing absolutely nothing, but yesterday was a pretty decent day. I was sent out on assignment to Gearspeed in Rancho Cucamonga for work, spent the majority of the day there, and then I headed over to the Bisimoto facility to check out DPK David’s tune. Bisi was tuning David’s K20 Civic coupe and dropping by Bisimoto Engineering also meant that Bisi was going to give me a first look at some of his latest projects…
So I woke up early Thursday morning and drove an hour from the Orange County area to Rancho Cucamonga, which is in the Inland Empire. I really didn’t have any idea what I was supposed to do out there, as Rodrez only told me to go out there to cover a tech story for Honda Tuning. Big Mike happened to be off work that day and was good friends with James over at Gearspeed so I asked him to come by and hang out while I shot whatever was going down over there. When I arrived at Gearspeed, they gave Big Mike and I a tour of their facility and then we walked over to a work station where I was greet to a pleasant surprise. The tech story I was sent out there to cover that day was actually a tear down and reassembly of a legit Spoon Sports K-series transmission from Japan…
I can’t really get into full details of what actually went down, you’ll have to wait until a future issue of Honda Tuning magazine for that, but here’s a quick shot of the Spoon tranny, assembled by Spoon, straight from one of their race cars…
It’s crazy to see what goes down at a place like Gearspeed because these guys that work there take apart transmissions and rebuild them like it’s a very simple job, when in reality, it is everything but. I mean, these guys can tear down a tranny, throw every single removable piece into a bin, machine-wash it, and put it all back together in about 30 minutes time. Shit was wild man, I’m telling you… Just to think about how intricate each Honda transmission is and how these guys know them like the back of their hands is mind boggling… The Spoon transmission was way more than I expected it to be because I honestly don’t have that much of a favorable view of Spoon Sports stuff, but honestly, I was impressed. They actually did some work on this transmission and didn’t just like, throw a different final drive in there and plaster a Spoon badge on it like every one of their other products. That shit was definitely a learning experience, and I have a ton of respect for guys that work on transmissions on a daily basis. These guys are very systematic and almost robotic in terms of their ability to work on these transmissions. Big props goes out to the guys over at Gearspeed for not only their skill, but also their hospitality. The facility itself is a trip too because it’s a gigantic warehouse filled to the brim with Honda transmissions and parts. The craziest thing about that facility is that they have a full gym next to their lunch area, and one of the offices even has a tanning bed inside of it…haha…I’m serious, you can’t even make that shit up…
I definitely stayed there longer than I expected to though. I got there around 11am and didn’t get out of there until almost 4pm in the afternoon. The time spent there was a productive one, so I can’t really complain…
After that Big Mike and I hopped into our cars and made our way down to the Bisimoto Engineering facility. DPK David’s tuning appointment was at 2pm so they were almost done by the time we got there. Luckily they still had one more final pull left on the dyno and I was able to witness it…
Here’s what it looked like when we pulled up. The coupe was still hooked up to the dyno, but Bisi was taking a little break to have a nice cold drink…
Bisi taking a moment to chat with Big Mike…
As for the tune….the numbers at that point were pretty decent but Bisi felt that there was quite a bit of restriction coming from the intake area…
He recommended to David that they take his filter off and mount a velocity stack to it for the final pull. David removed the filter he had on, mounted the velocity stack and aimed it upward to get maximum air flow…
Here’s a crappy video of the final run…
The filter did prove to be the issue as the final run yielded some pretty good results…
Final horsepower numbers can be seen above…
Both Bisi and David seemed to be pretty happy with the results. 218HP on a internally stock K20 Type-S motor tuned on a AEM EMS Series 2 is not too shabby… There isn’t anything else done to the motor but the basic intake, header, exhaust combination…
By the time they finished taking the car off the Dynapak, it was time to close up shop. The photo above is Bisi and DPK David after they came back from a test drive. David was all smiles because his motor has never run better…
While David and Bisi were busy finalizing the details of David’s tune, Big Mike asked me to take a new photo of his side project, which is a 1996 Honda Accord wagon. He recently put some Work Leadsleds on so he wanted to get a decent photo of it…
Big Mike claims he’s not gonna do anything crazy with this car but we’re all waiting for the day when he let’s us know that he’s doing a full Mil-spec harness and ITBs for it…just wait, it’ll happen…. Overall, the wagon is mint, The interior is like new and everything seems to be working very well mechanically. He’s always wanted a wagon and the perfect opportunity came up to purchase one….
That’s all for today. Make sure you guys click above at the top of the screen to pick up your Year.Three Chronicles Anniversary spots if you haven’t done so already. Spots are moving quickly so it’s a good idea if you jump on them now…
PURCHASE YOUR YEAR.THREE CHRONICLES ANNIVERSARY MEET PARKING SPOT HERE
NWP Summer Nights 2011 Coverage…Part 2 of 2…
Back now with the second part of the NWP Summer Nights 2011 Coverage held at the Eibach Springs facility…If you guys missed the first part make sure to scroll down and check it out…
When we last left off, the sun was setting quickly and Jared arrived in his Porsche with Big Mike. Throughout the night, people continued to show up in groups and by about 7:30-8pm, the lot was pretty full…
Here’s a look at what the front looked like just before it got dark. There were open spots scattered throughout the meet but for the most part, the turn-out was way better than anticipated…
Black DC5 with black chrome components under the hood…
One more shot of the white EK from part one…
SuperTwinz John, Rywire, Sheepey, and Jared hanging out in front of the main bay at Eibach…The guy that looks like Adam Levine from Maroon 5 is actually Tanner who owns the white 4-door Civic that was posted in part 1…
May hanging out and listening to Jared’s adventures in dating…
One more shot of Colin’s BB6 Prelude with rare Wisesquare aero…
Donut having a drink with Tony Jackson from Eibach Springs…
Jackie and May…
As you can tell from the photo above, it was starting to get pretty dark. I didn’t have a tripod nor did I bring any lighting so I just put my camera away and started using May’s Canon S95 point and shoot. I used the same camera when I took some behind-the-scenes shots during Sheepey’s Honda Tuning feature shoot. The photos were a little different from the norm because I was shooting in the S95′s “Nostalgic Mode”, which made for a cool look, so I decided to cover the rest of the NWP Summer Nights meet using the same feature….The previous two photos up top were actually shot with the S95 as well, but just in full-auto with no flash…
Ryan from Eibach Springs grilling up some meat and hot dogs for us to eat while we hung out…
Ryan’s ITR that he picked up a couple months back…
Arnel and Sid came up to me laughing and told me to walk over to this one white Civic coupe. I wanted to know what was so funny so I went to go check it out and saw that the car had a bootleg “Phase 2″ sticker on it…haha…weird…
A trio of Integra Type Rs…
Red Civic slammed on some SSR mesh…
Phaze2 Arnel’s 4-door, Sid’s Fit, and Sid’s brother’s Chevy as they were getting set to take off…
A red NSX on Work VS-XX that arrived late in the evening…
Tony Jackson and Ryan Hoegner…
DPK JP with his two baby boys…
Yellow S2000 on Enkei RPF1 and blue Cusco cage…
Carlos from DPK’s white-on-white S2000 CR…
Joseph aka Sloppy from AS1, Karl, and Karl’s girl chillin….You may not be very familiar with them but you probably know their cars…
Sloppy’s Fit…
Karl’s EM2 on CCWs…
Big Mike, Jared, and David…
Rywire Ryan taking off to go grab dinner with some of the guys…
JP and his boys…
S2000s…
A pretty clean Miata that I spotted on my last walk through to see whatever cars were left at the meet…
The majority of the crowd had dispersed by around 9:30pm or so and you can see from the photo that most of the cars were gone…We just hung out and talked for a little bit before we took off…
Ben from ATS Garage giving one of JP’s sons some water…
One final shot of Tony Jackson’s Civic…
That’s about it. We said our goodbyes to Ryan and the other Eibach Springs guys as they started to clean up and then we hopped into Ben’s G35 to head back home…
Back tomorrow with more updates, possibly the next installment of the Rywire ITR build…Thanks for looking…
NWP Summer Nights 2011 Coverage…Part 1 of 2…
Not many people knew about this meet because it was sort of an impromptu thing. There was a thread on the NWP4LIFE forums where there was some discussion in regards to a meet, but there was never really anything set in stone for a time and date until a couple days before this event took place. The whole idea behind this was just to do something small because Ryan from Eibach Springs didn’t want it to become a giant fiasco. For any of you who have gone to any of the annual Eibach Honda Meets, you already know how many cars that facility can hold and the type of foot traffic that it generates. Doing that would require permits, a larger staff to make sure all the cars got inside okay and no bullshit was going on, and that would just be more of a headache than it was really worth since this was meant to be a smaller meet. Ryan just wanted to get a couple NWP forum regulars to come out, chill, and just have a good time to celebrate the end of summer…
I’ll be honest, I didn’t even plan on going to the meet. Not because I didn’t want to, I just didn’t think that I could actually make it there. I was in Las Vegas, Nevada that entire weekend because I was attending the wedding of Mike from Plan B Motorsports. Mike is a good dude so it was cool that he invited us to go out there for his wedding and to allow us to be there for such a momentous occasion. Mike has been with his now-wife for ten years now and they wanted to step outside the typical wedding-box a little bit and just decided to have fun with it. As he said “it’s been a great ten years so we wanted to make it fun.” He went with a full costume-themed wedding and wanted everyone in attendance to dress up in different costumes. This was cool because it made things a lot easier and at no point was there ever a moment when things got overly serious, like many other weddings. I thought it was a great idea because it meant that I didn’t have to dress-up and do the slacks and tucked in shirt business. I mean, if it required that and it was a formal wedding, cool…but to have the opportunity to dress up and just do whatever we wanted definitely made things more entertaining…
Here’s a shot of a May, Big Mike, Rodrez, and Tes….May was an old school rapper with a giant inflatable boom box, Big Mike was doctor, Rodrez was the creepy guy at the club, and Tes was a pregnant Snooki… This was taken outside the “world famous” Little White Chapel in Vegas. I’ve never been to a wedding in this type of setting so it was definitely an interesting experience. The ceremony went by quickly, we all did some photos inside, and then headed out to El Segundo Sol for the reception. After that we got out of our costumes and then just hung out in Vegas. Big Mike actually arrived earlier that day to attend the wedding, and then headed home after the reception because he had work the following day…
While the wedding was quick and small, it was definitely something that I’ll always remember, just because of how unique it was. There was a lot going on that weekend with not only the NWP meet, but also Japanese Classic Car Show. I love attending that event every year, and I’m sure you guys have seen my coverage of the JCCS event in the past but I would gladly miss it again to attend the wedding of a friend. It was good to get away that weekend as well. I absolutely love going to Las Vegas to just chill and have a good time eating. I know a bunch of people love to get out there to go clubbing and do all that shit but honestly, I’ve been there and done that and the whole Vegas club experience isn’t something that I like, have a boiling feeling in my loins for, you know what I mean? I’ve partied everywhere, shit ain’t that different in Vegas and I don’t think it’s worth the hassle. I just wanted to get out there and do nothing. We are headed back there in about a month for the annual SEMA show anyway so there was no rush to do anything crazy…
I got back to my hotel late Saturday night and was looking at the NWP forums through my phone and noticed that the meet wasn’t going to start until 6pm Sunday night. I went to bed and woke up the next morning, had lunch, then headed back down to Los Angeles. I got back around 4:15pm, and hit up DPK David to see what time they were heading out to the meet. He said that he was heading out there with Jackie and Ben from ATS Garage so he came by, swooped May and I up, and we headed out to Corona to the Eibach facility. I wasn’t expecting much of a turn-out since there wasn’t any formal announcement of the event, but I was pleasantly surprised when I got there. Cars were beginning to fill the front lot and it looked like it was going to be a promising meet…
This is the Honda CR-Z that belongs to Eibach Springs. You probably remember it from last year’s SEMA show where it was parked with all the other CR-Zs that were distributed to various individuals/companies by Honda to build for their display. Brian from Hasport actually came by and picked this car up moments after I snapped this photo. I chatted with him for a little bit and he filled me in on what Eibach and Hasport had planned for this car. I don’t really know if I’m at liberty to reveal what they are doing but I promise you this; you guys won’t want to miss this thing at SEMA if you’re attending. For those of you who can’t make it there, I will definitely have some photos of this CR-Z’s new powerplant…
Tanner from Eibach Springs’ 4-door weekend track toy…
Sheepey’s turbo S2000…hopefully you guys have seen the video of this car that was made by Rodrez…if not make sure to click here to check it out…
Must be nice to be Ryan Basseri and have this as a weekend cruiser…
Phaze2 Arnel’s 4-door daily Civic on Mugen MF10L. He had a lip kit on the car at the Motion Auto Show a couple weeks ago but he’s since painted it and waiting to re-install it…
I really like the new SSR Professor SP3 wheels on Bryant’s TSX…I’ve enjoyed the progress on this car and it looks better than ever now with these wheels…
Mini Cooper on some old school Rays mesh wheels…
Spotted this K-turbo EK that I haven’t seen before…
Frankstar aka Bolt Boys Frank aka Downstar Frank’s Civic reppin’ Premium Garage Krew…
Always good to see Enrique Rosario and his Civic…this build is also one of those builds that have come a long way. There are always subtle changes to this car that many probably wouldn’t notice. He’s taking his time with this car and working at his own pace, which is a good thing…. I thought the interior shot was interesting because the bag of Lay’s potato chips and the drink from Subway somehow match the color scheme of his car…hah…hopefully this was unintentional and he doesn’t force himself to eat and drink things that only match his car….
Alex Colon’s Civic is another car that has seen some new gradual changes and subtle upgrades…the engine bay is looking good these days with his Rywire harness installed…
Speaking of Rywire, here he is with Brandon from Autolife TV staring at each other with hungry eyes…
Saw this ITR and it reminded me of what ATS Anh’s R looked like before it went through it’s massive transformation…
Always liked this del Sol but never met the owner…he’s always rocking a Chronicles and HellaSUNK sticker so I have to give him a shout-out for showing me love…
This del Sol on Regas is usually parked next to the one above and is also a very nice, simple build…kinda sucks but in this lighting, you can see that his front end doesn’t match the rest of his car…
Went by to snap a couple more shots of Sheepey’s S2000 after he popped his hood…
Really liked this red Civic coupe of Volk NRS wheels…
Chatted with the owner of this Prelude, Colin, for a little bit…he’s a really nice guy and has a pretty rare Wisesquare aero kit on his Prelude…I think it might be like possibly one of two kits that exist here stateside…
This EK was the same one that I was talking about from my Nisei coverage this year. I didn’t get a photo of it at the show so I made sure to snap a shot of it at the meet….Clean build and about as close to a real EK9 as you’re going to get…
This Civic had all the right parts on it…Mugen MF10Ls, parts from Backyard Special, and a K-swap…I just think it would look much better if it was maybe an inch or two lower…
4-door Integra on some black Enkei RPF1…
Donut probably had one of the most recognizable EG builds of all-time (click here if you’re unfamiliar) , but he’s been MIA from the Honda community since he sold his car and bought an Infiniti G35… He actually does still own a Honda and the Integra above is his weekend track car. There really isn’t much to the car, just some basic mods and some black 949 wheels but he takes it to the track and beats the shit out of it and has a blast. I haven’t seen him in awhile so it was cool to meet up with him and cruise out to the meet together…
Speaking of Hondas that get a beating on the track, this white hatchback belongs to Tony Jackson from Eibach Springs…
In this shot you can see how the middle section of the meet was kind of empty. More cars showed up later on but I found it interesting that even though there were plenty of open spots up front, people were still rolling up and parking along the side of the building. I guess people are so conditioned to be parked like how they are at the annual Eibach meets that they automatically assume the front is reserved for “VIP” guests, and that certainly wasn’t the case for this meet…
I really like this 4-door Integra that belongs to “Charlesfoo”…I love the red Bride-themed interior and the black 949s…it’s very simple on the outside but everything just works…I snap a pic of it every time I see it at an event…
Big Mike had left Vegas the night before so that he could go to work Sunday and then come to the meet after so it was strange to not see him there after we arrived at the meet. He’s usually one of the first ones there and I was about to give him a call until he rolled up with Jared in Jared’s Porsche….Jared was all smiles but Big Mike was looking kind of upset about something. I asked what was wrong and he said that the drive home from Vegas and then work just beat him up that whole day….
That’s about it for today, I have another batch of photos but that will go up tomorrow…It got dark real quick so I had to switch cameras later on in the night to be able to continue coverage. Stay tuned for more tomorrow…thanks for looking…
Motion Auto Show 2011 Coverage…Part 3…The Finale…
What’s up everyone, time to close out the third and final installment of the Motion Auto Show 2011 Coverage. Sorry for the lack of an update yesterday. I was running around taking care of some everyday shit like getting new tires for my beater as well as doing some product photography for Rywire. Judging how the hits have been lately, it seems as if everyone is happy with the coverage up to this point. Any time you have a combination of cars and girls with their asses hanging out it always makes for good hits…
Umm, not really much else to say about the show…it was definitely one of the best of the year so far but there wasn’t any crazy funny stories going on or anything dramatic. Gonna probably just close this out with the last bit of photos now…enjoy…
This was what I was talking about in part 1 with the girls standing inside the engine bays and shit…In all my years of going to shows, this had to have been a first…Hope it doesn’t become a regular occurrence at events because then you will have girls trying to climb into engine bays at local car meets and outdoor shows and shit where the engines are going to be hot…haha, nothing good will come of that. It’s not like they can just like hop out and shit either. I mean, that leg gets caught in a hot ass exhaust manifold, that shit is DONE…or like a girl with her ass hanging out trying to sit on a valve cover that’s been sitting out in the sun…uh yeaaah…
Ryan’s NSX sitting in the Falken Honda display section…
Ms. Maureen Chen was modeling for Team Hybrid that day but took a moment to walk over to the PASmag model search area…
Playboy mode Julri Waters did the same…
Here she is with Joselyn Cano at the Sony or something or other booth….I’m not sure if that’s really her name either so if you go and Google her name and an old lady with 2 crusty vaginas show up, it’s not my fault…
APR widebody G35 from TWCompetition…
Toyota MR-2 from Team Hybrid…
Lexus LS460, also from Hybrid, with wheels that look too small for it…
Chameleon-ish 350Z…someone should tell the owner that chrome vinyl will fuck your paint up pretty bad if you apply it directly to your car. That’s why I always tell people to put the stickers on the windows and glass instead of on paint…
I don’t know if you guys remember this WRX wagon or not but I did a story on it for Super Street a couple months back (towards the beginning of the year I believe) and it used to be silver. I had no idea he had the car repainted so it was a little surprising to see it at the show… it’s a cool build. Originally meant to be a beater wagon, then he started adding all kinds of shit to it, even customizing Voltex aero pieces to fit on the wagon chassis…
Crappy ass shot of Sheepey’s S2000. I honestly forgot the car was there entirely until Sheepey came up to the booth the hang out. By the time I got over there to get a shot of it, everyone was cleaning up already and the hood was closed…
S14 from Garage Boso…
Saw this really nice Mazda RX-2 towards the back end of the show. I missed out on all these cars at Nisei Showoff so I had to get a shot of it at Motion…
This one looks like it’ll fuck some shit up…
Spotted this NSX during roll-in the night before…the kit itself is really aggressive but I kinda wished he would have gone with more “fitting” wheels…if you know what I mean…Not only in terms of sizing and all but just the style of the wheel in general…
Oh okay, so here is a shot of one of the trophies that were specially designed by Troy Sumitomo from 5Axis for the Motion Auto Show… It’s pretty wild. Like one of those things where if you left it in your living room and then tripped and landed on it, you might rip your neck open…
JonJon’s IS350 from 1-Up…
Charles’ widebody S2000 from 1-Up…
Jose Romo’s Audi A3 on Work VS-XX wheels…
One more shot of Dennis’ STi while they were taking the tent down at the Mizu Cooling Solutions booth…
I think a lot of people slept on this Hyundai at the Motion show. I first saw it at the SEMA show in Vegas last year when it was parked in the Hyundai area in the center hall. You wouldn’t really think much of it, other than the kit and the HRE wheels but when you look at the back of it, you can tell that there’s so much more going on…
This is a crappy photo but if you look into the rear hatch glass, you can see that the motor is actually mounted in the rear…
You can see here how the exhaust is mounted through the rear bumper and how the vent has been added to the rear hatch where the emblem sits…Also notice the vents where the glass runs along the shoulder of the car…pretty sick build…
Abraham’s Civic, absent are the females that were crawling all over/inside it…
Arnel from Phaze2 recently installed a new lip kit to his 4-door….
2GS from Infinit Wheels…
Not really sure how I feel about this new look on Ejay’s DA….I really loved the SSR Super Mesh and I felt that it was the perfect set of wheels for his car. He said he has these on now instead because he doesn’t wanna have to deal with camber and ride height issues anymore…Ehh..I don’t know…
Downstar Frank’s right-hand drive EG on SSR Shumachers with optional center caps…
Top Secret Supra from Auto Concept Elite…
Billy’s HKS-themed IS300…
Mini from Auto Concept Elite…
Another angle of the Auto Concept line-up…
One more shot of the Falken Tire Honda display…
I loved the Motion Auto Show but I was scratching my head when I saw this DA inside the show by the back gate parked next to this stock Mustang…I like, stopped what I was doing just to take this photo…
Here’s something to make up for that last photo…haha…
That was pretty much it for the Motion show. After that I kinda just stood around and chatted with people until the awards ceremony ended and they let the cars out…I didn’t really go to the stage to check out what was going on for the awards because the majority of our guys were not competing that day since they were a part of the Falken Tire display…
Here’s a shot of ATS Angel’s S2000 as I was walking out to the vendor parking lot to pick up my 4Runner…. It took quite a while for me to get back inside with my truck since they wanted all the show cars out first but eventually they just let me in so we packed up the truck, said bye to the Falken Tire staff, and then took off..
Since the Long Beach Convention Center always has strict regulations regarding how much fuel can be in a car that’s parked inside, the guys had to get gas right after they left the venue…
One more shot of Ryan’s NSX while it was posted up at the gas station…
After that we all met up back at the Rywire facilities to drop off the cars, then we met up with the girls at a local Vietnamese food spot to have dinner. We hadn’t really eaten anything the whole day so we grubbed like no tomorrow. Nothing crazy went on once dinner was finished. We just talked and hung out and then everyone went home to get some rest….
That’s a wrap…thanks for looking…
Motion Auto Show 2011 Coverage…Part 1…
So for the delay, I just had a couple things I had to knock out before finally getting to the Motion Auto Show coverage. I have to first off give a huge thank you to Paul Nguyen from Pro-Motion Distributing. I never intended to have a booth at the Motion show, but Paul was kind enough to approach me at the Eibach 2011 event earlier this year to offer me a spot. I honestly kind of slept on the idea and just totally lagged it and fucked everything up. I didn’t hit Paul up about it again until probably the week leading up to the show and he was kind enough to squeeze me in and gave me a terrific spot. I had never met Paul previous to that but he was so great about letting me know that I was a welcome part of the Motion Auto event. Even on the day of the show Paul came up to me to thank me for coming out, shit was unbelievable…if anything I owed him big for giving me the opportunity. For that, I give a huge thumbs-up to Paul and Pro-Motion…
Now onto my thoughts on the show….Man, with a three week block of shows, I was expecting to be completely burned out from doing car shit week after week. Spocom was cool, but it wasn’t anything that I would run and tell people about….Nisei Showoff 2011 is always a show that I will be a huge part of because of the history of the Showoff events….and the Motion Auto Show, was the perfect ending to that three week block because the show itself, had all the elements of a well organized, well thought out event. Obviously with all these shows going on, you’re going to run into the same cars over and over, that’s expected. Spocom lacked the amount of cars that I would have preferred to see and almost seemed to take on more of an “Extreme Autofest” feel. The Motion Auto Show hosted way more cars, and the quality of cars was just better. I’m not going to compare it to Nisei obviously, because they are two completely different shows. Motion and Spocom are both heavily backed by the aftermarket parts industry so they had the funding and location to have huge events. The Motion show was great because it had elements that everyone would enjoy at a car show. If anything, it is the new “standard” of how all import automotive events and competitors should follow their lead. It had the cars, it was held at a great venue, and the girls…holy shit, there was a fucking shit ton of females there. If you are a guy or gal that goes to car shows just to stare at females, this was the show to be at. There were models at every corner, everywhere you looked. If you are there for the cars, then the females were a bit of a distraction, but that just comes with going to a car show of this size. I’m sure Tony and the It’s JDM Yo!!! staff was having a fucking field day shooting photos of girls. There were so many girls there that some were posing inside the fucking engine bay of some cars. It was a first for me for sure…but I literally saw girls standing like inside the engine bay of people’s cars. I mean, I don’t think you get what I mean….For example, I saw a girl standing inside Bolt Boys Frank’s engine bay like, inbetween his radiator and header. How she managed to cram herself in there I have no idea, but they managed to do it. Sometimes you would even have like 3 cars on one car and girls had to like dislocate their fucking joints and shit to fit inside a photo….it was crazy…
I wish I would have been able to cover the event with more depth because I have taken a look at other site’s event coverage and there was a significant amount of vehicles that I did indeed miss. Instead of spending all my time shooting though, I was busy operating The Chronicles booth. May had taken all of her time last weekend preparing for Nisei and also spent the whole day working the booth, so I didn’t want her to spend another weekend stuck at a car show, so I worked the booth with DPK David while May and David’s fiance, Jackie, went out to have a girl’s day. It was all good though because I thought it would be good to just sit back and enjoy a show for once and make a little bit of money. Whenever I had a free moment, I did go out and snap some photos though. A lot of the cars will be the same as you have seen during this entire month so expect that. There wasn’t that much debauchery from our side because we spent most of the day at the booth. The most interesting element of this 3-part series of Motion Auto Show coverage will definitely be the models. I’m sure that’s why you’re looking up Motion Auto Show coverage anyways…I didn’t go hunting for model shots or anything, that’s just not what I’m about. That’s Tony and It’s JDM Yo!!!’s prerogative…I captured whatever I saw at that particular moment and if it ended up being a good photo, so be it…Models don’t like to be photographed by me at events anyways because I usually just snap photos of them without waiting for them to pose for me. One reason behind that is because I’m always on the go snapping other photos, and the second reason is that I have the terrible shakes and by the time I’m able to focus and snap a photo of the model, they already think I took the shot already and start looking elsewhere or doing other shit….That’s why a lot of the models you’ll see on here are like, not looking at my camera. They started out doing that but probably thought I was fucking with them because I just stood there with a camera pointed at them and nothing was happening…haha…
Let’s get started with the photos…
I posted up some photos from the whole Saturday set-up process last weekend, but one of the photos that I left out was a shot I took while we ate lunch at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. Roscoe’s is a staple of Long Beach, CA so whenever we get a chance to head to that area we try to grab a bite there. After we finished setting up The Chronicles booth at Motion, we all met up at Roscoes along with Bakari Howard and the some of the other guys from Falken Tire…
Not much really happened that night. We met up for dinner, hung out for a bit, and then went home to rest up for the show that Sunday. I got back to the Long Beach Convention Center around 10:30am along with DPK David and Ben from ATS Garage and spent an hour or so prepping the booth. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving all my merchandise at the booth over night at the show so we brought it on Sunday and the guys helped me carry it in…
I had a couple stickers on display so that people could decide which Chronicles decal they wanted to purchase. That day I had the 2011 Nisei Edition “Battleship Grey”, the traditional black on chrome, as well as the Eibach 2011 edition of the Chronicles decal…
I also debuted the brand new Ver. II HURT FEELINGS t-shirts. We updated the design a bit and had a new grey shirt available as well as black versions…
The show opened up at 11am that day so I just hung out at the booth for awhile. Some people came by to say what’s up and show their appreciation for the site, which was really cool. DPK David and ATS Ben then took off to go move some cars around in the Falken Tire section. Loi Song from Sportcar Motion then arrived at the show to hang out. He really didn’t have anything planned that day so he just sat in the booth with me while we people-watched…
It was a little slow so I decided to pick up the camera and take some quick snaps. Here is a shot of the Falken Tire area, where they had set-up an all-Honda/Acura display. You should be able to identify a majority of the Hondas in this photo because they are some pretty familiar faces…
There wasn’t much done to this Honda CR-Z but it was in the Takeda booth directly across from mine, so we spent most of the day staring right at it….
To the left across a wider walkway was the Injen booth where they had this Volkswagon CC on display as well as a 3-series BMW…
Tony from It’s JDM Yo!!! and I actually shared a 10×20″ space at the show, so that was pretty cool. I knew if and when I had to go walk the show, I could rely on him to operate my booth for me and take care of things. He had all kinds of people around his booth the whole day. It’s pretty crazy to think how big his site has gotten since he started it. He’s got a couple guys shooting for him now and at the Motion show, he had this model at his booth. I believe her name is like Rachelle Viado or something similar to that. I’m not good with names…
I got a bit thirsty so I had Tony watch things while David and I went over to the NOS area to grab some drinks…When we got over there, we were greeted with this crazy ice sculpture that helped to serve NOS samples to show attendees. It was a pretty cool idea…I doubt it really sped up the process of getting drinks out to people, but it was cool nonetheless…If I ever became like, filthy rich or some shit, I think I would have one of these NOS ice sculptures delivered every single day and placed in front of my toilet. Then I could have fancy pee sessions because ice sculptures make everything more classy. I don’t know how long it would last and because my pee is probably hot but whatever, I’m fucking rich. I could even take a dump into it and use it as some sort of NOS ice turd cannon…
After I spent some moments staring at the NOS girls and their sample serving, I turned around and spotted this model, who reminded me of this porn star named Rachel Roxxx. As I was taking this photo, I was thinking about this one scene that Rachel Roxxx did recently where she was getting DPed by two dudes…If you don’t know what DP is and aren’t well-versed in the lingo of the adult movies, try to picture an electrical outlet where both outlets are plugged-in….yeah it’s kinda like that….If that also doesn’t make sense, just think of a conventional hot dog and bun set-up, but this particular hot dog….has two hot dogs instead of just one…Do you get it now?…
Two McDonald’s chicken nuggets….ONE sauce…haha, okay moving on…
After I finished grossing myself out thinking about nasty shit, I stopped by the Falken Tire section to say what’s up to everyone. Big Mike had just gotten off work and returned to the show, and guys like Mike G. were standing around chatting with other guys…Here’s a shot of Mike’s “Tank” next to Anh’s ITR…
The “Tank”…
Anh’s Integra Type R…
Angel’s S2000 with Big Mike in the background with others…
Big Mike’s Prelude…
This black RSX with Backyard Special aero was parked in the Falken Tire area along with Big Mike and the others…
Danny from PlusOne’s coupe…
There wasn’t much going on over there so I headed back over to the booth to sit down…The 5Axis booth was also pretty close so I snapped this shot of a matte white tC that I spotted. That red contraption you see in front of it was actually one the Motion Auto Show trophies, designed by Troy from 5Axis…I have a better shot of it later on in the coverage….
At this point, people were beginning to trickle in so I decided to walk around a do some more coverage while I still had the chance too…
Michelle Yee modeling for Savini wheels….
E46 BMW M3 with Japanese Voltex aero…
Scion xB rocking the Gulf livery…
Infiniti M on AME Shallen LX wheels…
I journeyed over to the area where all the TWC cars were and saw that they also had an elaborate ice sculpture. I then remembered that I had seen the TWC crew rocking ice sculptures in the past at other events so they were probably responsible for the one that was also at the NOS booth…Later on in the day, Salem told me he saw this ice sculpture fall over and almost hit Ka Wong’s orange AE86…
TWC went all out for the Motion Auto Show. They had their own DJ, a fucking ice sculpture with their own crew name on it, a bunch of nice cars, and also had their own models. Here is one of them rolling around on the back of some huge fucking truck… The funniest thing I saw all day was the two go-go dancers that were in the TWC area. They were dancing like they someone had the fast forward button pushed and a majority of the time, they weren’t even dancing to the beat of the songs that the DJ was playing…shit was crazy…
Melyssa Grace posing on a motorcycle in the TWC area…The guy in the background snapping the photo of her cleavage looks like DPK Darryl making a pouty-face…Melyssa Grace probably went blind after I snapped this photo since the brightness of my flash was so intense….Shit was acting up all day and was just a total pain in the ass…
Yellow FD3S RX-7 from TWCompetition…
Ka Wong’s F20C-swapped AE86 Corolla…
Always love seeing this widebody orange Infiniti G35…
A model passing out some flyers about AutoImportCraze’s new website…
Widebody Toyota Supra representing Squad One San Diego…
A couple shots of Tracy Linh…
Genevieve Chanelle and friend…
Oh here’s a good example of what I was talking about earlier…Genevieve Chanelle was hawking at me wondering why I was taking so fucking long to take the photo. At this point, she was already over it and saying “fuck this guy” to me while her friend stepped-in and picked up the slack…
Another shot of ATS Angel’s S2000…
I’m sure you guys remember my photo from Spocom of this young lady posing alongside an old ass man who was making a jerk-off motion with his hand….Well she was back in black at the Motion Auto Show…I think someone mentioned that her name was Kai Lansangan or something like that, but I prefer to call her the name I coined for her after I saw her at Spocom….TITLA MCBOOB…
Here’s Titla flippin’ her herr…
Titla McBoob striking a pose for another photog….Haha…seriously though, her real name is Kai Lansangan…That may be her real name or an internet persona, I don’t fucking know but it sounds pretty legit to me…If she wanted to go by an easier, more recognizable name, she would probably have gone with Titla McBoob…
Gonna close it out for today with a couple shots of Big Steve’s LS400…This thing has been sitting in a garage for what seems like 49 years now, so it was cool to see it out again, especially since it was the car on the Motion Auto Show flyer…Big Steve and I are a lot alike…we are both Asian and drive cars…haha, I’m just fucking with you, it’s late and I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about…I’ve been up for almost two days straight so it’s time for me to hit the hay…
Two more parts of Motion Auto Show Coverage to follow, thanks for looking….
Nisei Showoff 2011 Coverage…Part 6…The Finale…
Alright, time to close out the 2011 Nisei Showoff coverage with some random photos towards the end of the show, the awards ceremony, and at the end I’ve attached some of my favorite photos that I took from the show. Those won’t be in any particular order, they’re just shots that I thought were good. Overall, I think it was a great event. Foot traffic of course was a bit slower than in year’s past, but that was expected because of the 3-week block of shows. It’s really unprecedented to have that happen and definitely a first, but I’m happy to say that I was able to go to every show during those three weeks and was able to experience each of them. It’s crazy that it wrapped up with the Motion show because that was probably the most anticipated event of the summer. That’s not taking anything away from Nisei Showoff though. Nisei has and always will be a staple in our community’s history and it was more than kind of Ken Myoshi to have me be a huge part of it. I hope everyone enjoyed the 6-part mini-series of Nisei Showoff. I like to cover these events in such a way that you get to see not only nice cars, but also details behind their builds and stuff you may miss if you aren’t actually there in person. The GENERATIONS line-up came together quickly and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I think the general consensus from every Honda head that was there was that it was a positive move in bringing everyone together for one show. Hopefully in the near future I will be able to do the GENERATIONS line-up again but with even more people participating and more Hondas that we have all grown to know and love throughout the years. With that said, thank you everyone for coming over to The Chronicles to check out the coverage and I am appreciative of your continued support…
Now, let’s move onto the last batch of photos…
Lance Uchida, who helped drive Billy Shea’s IS300 out to the show, packing up along with some friends before awards took place…
You can’t look at Billy’s HKS-themed IS300 without taking a look at the amazing engine bay…
Billy’s HKS T51R turbine…
Sportcar Motion’s newly-built drag K24 Civic…I think a lot of people are misinformed when they see this car since they have become so used to Sportcar’s involvement with time attack. This is purely a drag car for their personal use. Nothing but pure straight line racing…
The motor currently makes around 350whp but plans are already underway to boost the K and make even more power. As of this week, the parts from AFI Turbo have already arrived at the shop and tear down will begin shortly…
Speaking of turbo Ks, one more shot of RC’s work-in-progress 4-door Civic…
Mike G. and DPK Jared having some fun and posing for a shot…
Mike G.’s buddy had this pristine real deal Civic Type R park with us since I ended up with an extra parking space when Will from Circuit Hero let us know that he couldn’t make it out…
Rywire Ryan and ATS Angel discussing some future plans, whether it be car shit or what to eat for dinner…
ATS FCB with his son Jaylen…
May and I were at the show for the whole day watching over The Chronicles booth, so we didn’t get an opportunity to go walk around J-town to grab a bite to eat…Luckily there was a sketchy-ass cart right outside of the front gates to Nisei Showoff where they sold “Danger Dogs” aka bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Definitely not the safest thing to eat, especially considering that there is meat being cooked on a rolling cart and mayo has been sitting out all day, but hey, sometimes you have to live dangerously…
As unsafe as it sounded, the thought of eating a bacon-wrapped hot dog inspired everyone’s appetites so the homies also went and bought some dogs…If there’s germs, the hot ass peppers are sure to kill them right? Haha…
Rhett and friends taking a closer look at Anh’s ITR…
Miss Chaba with an impromptu pose…
Rom, Jared, and Ryan beginning the sticker-removal process so that Jared and drive home with clear visibility…
After that came the hood re-install…Apparently it takes 5 dudes to put on an S2K hood…
WheelFlip model Tina striking a pose…
One more shot of Big Mike’s Prelude as the sun was making it’s way down…
Dennis from Team Hybrid’s STi that was near the front stage where the awards ceremony took place…
Even though Ken doesn’t have any major sponsors backing the Showoff series anymore, it doesn’t mean that he’s ever skimped on the awards at his shows. He’s always been more than generous with the number of awards and awards classes and appreciative of every make and model that participates…
It’s JDM Yo!!! x 1-Up, Tony’s super crew (aka The Vanguard Collective), anticipating some awards…
Peter Vong holding up his 3rd place trophy in the Nissan/Infiniti Class for his LS14…
Salem from Phaze2 holding up his 3rd Place Acura Class trophy for his J’s Racing TSX….
Big Mike with another 1st Place Honda trophy…
Jonathan “JonJon” Usaha holding up his “JDM VIP Showoff” award…
Jaylen and Fred from ATS up to receive the Integra/RSX showoff award for Anh Truong’s Integra Type R…
Sam Ip winning back-to-back years in the “ES/FG Civic Showoff” award with two separate cars…
Chris Sakai won the “EK Civic Showoff” award…
Mike G. with his “EG Civic Showoff” award. These awards are given to the best of that particular chassis at Showoff so it was cool to have Mike, Chris, and Anh win in their respective classes. It was cool to see Sam win again as well and the “EF Civic Showoff” award (if I remember correctly) went to the 4-door red EF Civic and that was definitely deserving…I didn’t get a chance to snap a photo of Angel winning his 2nd Place Honda Class award because I was busy shooting off a mini-confetti gun at him…
Peter up to grab the “Team Showoff” award for It’s JDM Yo! x 1-Up, which was given to the best car crew of the event…
We were all watching the Toyota and old school class awards fly by with no mention of Ka Wong’s name and we were honestly all a bit surprised. Ka of course is the owner of that beautifully-built F20C-swapped orange AE86. He’s usually a lock at almost every show to bring something home like Billy’s IS300 so we were thinking that maybe he was overlooked by the judges…
…and then they called his name and he walked up to the stage to win the coveted “Custom Showoff” award, which is the 1st runner-up to what basically is “the best of show” honors…Very well deserved. Ka’s Corolla is a remarkable build and a contender for best of show at any import event…The guy is also one of the most humble people ever as well so he couldn’t be more deserving…
…and the winner of course for the best of show, known as the “Showoff Auto” award went to Billy Shea’s HKS IS300. The photo above is Lance picking up the award since Billy couldn’t be there. It’s practically automatic for him to win because the car has it all, exterior aesthetics, performance upgrades, interior mods, custom paint, and custom audio…Congrats to Billy and the rest of the winners at Nisei Showoff 2011…
I was pretty happy with the results that the GENERATIONS line-up was able to produce… Integra/RSX Showoff, EK Civic Showoff, EG Civic Showoff (not pictured), 3rd Place Acura Class,2nd Place Honda Class, and 1st Place Honda Class…Doesn’t sound like much considering we had over 20 Hondas but you have to remember that these guys were pretty much competing with one another in the same classes…
After the annoying ass announcer was done promoting his own shit while giving out the awards, we walked back over to finish cleaning up and saying buy to everyone before they took off…
Here’s one more shot of Jorge Hernandez’s gold EG as the night quickly approached…
…and a shot of Mike Schietroma’s EM1 and Ejay Adriano’s DA Integra…
Ryan snacking on some JDM crunchy peas as we were getting ready to take off from the downtown Los Angeles lot…
Nothing to exciting happened after we left…We all went home to shower and take a break, then we headed down to the city of Irvine to go have dinner together and talk about the show….
Gonna close it out today with some bonus stuff for you guys. Below is a video of Nisei Showoff 2011, created by Honda Tuning head editor Rodrez…peep that. And when you’re done, I’ve included a couple of photos that I really liked from Nisei but in a larger format for your viewing pleasure. Thanks everyone for looking, thanks for supporting The Chronicles, and thanks for supporting Ken Myoshi and the Showoff events…Until next time…
Click on the links below each photo for larger versions…
History in the making… Larger Version (1400×933)
Fin.
Nisei Showoff 2011 Coverage…Part 2…
Back with part 2 of the Nisei 2011 coverage. Today we will be taking a look at some cars that were in the first two rows of the show where my booth was. I was still hanging out at the booth at the time and didn’t really want to move since the sun was blazing hot. Before the event started, a bunch of us even drove to one of the Japanese markets down the street to buy some nice cold drinks to cool down while we waited for May to finish making her fruit drinks. It was definitely hotter than we expected so it was a good thing we had a canopy to be under. I went out in short spurts to take photos and then quickly ran back under the canopy as to not get burnt, so the photos in the first few sections of the coverage are just of the front area. I didn’t make my way through to see the rest of the show until much later on in the day. Anyways, hopefully today will be drama free in the comments section and everybody can just sit back and enjoy the photos…
A couple people are complaining that I always cover the same shit over and over, so to start it out today, I’m gonna post some photos of cars that I have posted before….
Edgar Loyoza’s purple G35 was one of the cars that I really enjoyed staring at all day. I love the SSR Professor SP3 wheels and the subtle aero…
Ka Wong’s AE86 F20C-powered Corolla has to be, bar none, one of my favorite builds of all time. Everything is executed as close to perfect as it gets and to top it off, Ka is a very nice guy and I always enjoy running into him at events…
His engine bay has a lot of little nice touches. Look at the bolts with the purple beauty washers used in every part of the bay possible, even where the wiper used to be mounted…And as weird as it sounds, a Honda S2000 motor looks like it belongs in an 8-6….
Shooting his Corolla and doing a story on it for Super Street magazine was also one of my favorite shoots. I loved the way the photos came out and it’s cool to see that he brought the plaque out with him to display at Nisei Showoff…
ItsJDMYo!!! and 1-UP crew…
DPK David in the GENERATIONS section…Told this dude to move his car back like 16 times because it was sticking out past everyone else’s cars and he was busy DJing in one of Tony’s booths with his friend…
Sheepey’s S2000 parked in what I call “the ditch”…I had the exact same spot last year and Salem parked there. That groove was so deep that Salem’s TSX looked like it was flipped over on its side when he had his front wheel sitting in the groove. We were kind of joking around that Sheepey would be mad his car was parked right there but it wasn’t intentional. That’s how all the cars lined up and he just so happened to be at that exact spot. I was gonna put my booth there but with 22 cars even, I divided it up evenly down the middle and my booth ended up being 2 car spots down from there…
Sheep’s wild turbo, dump tube, and dual waste gate set-up…
Jared talking to Alex from WheelFlip about his custom M7s…
Big Mike talking to one of the judges, Amy, while she was judging his Prelude for the Honda Class category…
Big Mike’s Prelude on freshly refinished Volk SE37Ks…
A quick look at Jeff Campbell’s engine bay…
It’s crazy to think that the last time this Civic made a public appearance was at the 2006 Eibach Meet…Thanks to ICB Matt for bringing it out for the line-up…
2GS that was parked with Infinit Wheels…I liked how the rear fender was modified but doesn’t look haggered like a lot of other guys who are trying to fit aggressive wheels on their cars…
Really loved this BMW with Japanese Voltex aero and HRE wheels…Very nice mash-up of styles…
Says it all…
Mike G. enjoying one of the drinks that May prepared…
Anh’s loves teal…
Frankstar aka Mexican Zac Efron checking out Sheepey’s bay…
Billy’s IS300 came out once again to collect a best of show trophy. I’m starting to think that this car is untouchable in that class and it’s very deserving of the praise….
Engine bay shot of Sportcar Motion’s newly debuted Civic….
Phaze2 Salem’s TSX was a part of the GENERATIONS line-up. Not only does it have the best TSX components that J’s Racing has to offer, it’s also turned into quite a capable weekend track car, as evidenced by it’s great performance at the Super Street FF Battle 3…
Leon Casino’s CR-X was a late addition to the GENERATIONS line-up. I had contacted him about possibly being a part of it but with his baby due any time now, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to make it out. He called me at the 11th hour of roll-in and asked if I had a spot for him and we made room. I really wanted him to park with the older guys for the “past” section but that area was filled up and I had a spot up front since Will from Circuit Hero no-showed, and that’s where he ended up…
RC Chacon’s newly debuting EG sedan build. He wasn’t quite finished with it yet, as I stated in part 1, but it made for a perfect fit for the “future” portion of my line-up…Interested to see what else he plans on doing to this Civic. Maybe when the 3-year anniversary meet goes down towards the end of the year, he will make another appearance in it’s finished state…
Always enjoy seeing this GR Subaru STI on Volk TE37SLs… I think I use this exact same line every time I post a photo of this car…haha…
PlusOne Danny’s coupe…
Sheeps and ATS Angel…
RX-8 on BBS wheels…
Vincent Shu’s LS400… He used to have a 2GS and I actually bought my AMEs off of him…
TL on HREs…
As usual Socal car events usually have celebrity appearances from time to time. At the Super Street FF Battle 3 dyno day, we saw an appearance by Birdman. At Nisei…
Richard Attenborough aka the old man from Jurassic Park showed up in period-correct attire in honor of GENERATIONS….haha. Loi spotted him first and I asked him which Jurassic Park movie he liked the most, and he clearly enjoyed the second one the most…
Sam Ip’s new black 8th gen. Civic build, which replaces the white one that he totalled awhile back…The container of parts from Japan he was waiting on didn’t make it to the states in time, but he promises that there are all kinds of new J’s Racing parts in there for his car…Looks promising so far and very different from his previous Spoon Sports theme…
Arn Reyes’s Integra with the Hershey front bumper….
Charles from 1-Up’s widebody S2000…
A bagged and kitted Prius that I saw while walking towards the front gate…
Mike Schietroma’s Civic with BYS front bumper…loving the red Vision seats…
Closing it out with a trio of history-making EGs….if these three cars could talk, man, the stories that they could tell….
That’s all for today, thanks for looking…Oh and sorry that some of the tones are off on some of the photos compared to the others. I edited them at different times and they are from different times of the day but I actually went and organized the photos for once to make sure they were in order of what I was talking about and this happens…yikes…
Nisei Showoff 2011 Coverage…Part 1…An Introduction…
“Honor the past…Appreciate the present…Build for the future…”
GENERATIONS
presented to you by The Chronicles…
I wanted to start off the coverage with a formal explanation of the line-up that I put together at Nisei Showoff 2011. I’ve been looking around online and some people were wondering what the whole “Generations” sticker was about that they saw on some cars there and if you follow the site regularly, then you already know why. For those that don’t and are just here to see the coverage now, allow me to explain. Ken Myoshi hit me up a couple weeks ago wanting to know if I had any ideas to throw at him for our collaboration that we were doing. I try to work with Ken and Showoff a lot because I appreciate what Ken Myoshi has done throughout the years for the entire import automotive community. It was the original import car show back in the early 90′s, long before Hot Import Nights, any of that NOPI garbage, Import Fest, Wekfest, Spocom, etc. It will always be THE original import car show event. I always make it a point to work with Ken because it’s an honor for me to do so. I’ve always been a heavy supporter of his Showoff events in the past and attended them whenever I could (and that was often). Having The Chronicles collaborate with Ken is something that I never imagined I would be able to do. No matter what I want to call it, this is a blog about Hondas. Simple as that. I didn’t think working with Showoff was possible because this site is not very significant in the broader scheme of the import automotive community. It was cool of Ken to ask because for whatever reason, he values my opinion and thinks that I can help him push his show. Last year, I collaborated with him with the “Top Ten Showoff” where I brought out a couple of Hondas that I throught were really nice and it worked out well. I had a booth, I sold some things, and the show overall was a success. Ken liked what I did and he asked me to help him out again this year…
For this year’s Nisei event, I had a very short amount of time to put something together because I’ve been busy taking care of other things, and just hadn’t had much time to contact Ken about what we should do. When I contacted Ken, we threw some ideas out at each other but nothing was really set in stone. I told him I’d reconnect with him on AOL Instant Messenger the very next day at around the same time, which was early in the a.m. around 1:30. The next day came and went and we didn’t get a chance to talk. This was a week before the event was set to take place…and I had nothing. Whenever I drive to May’s place to go spend time with her, I always spend those 35-40 minutes on the highway brainstorming ideas for the site. Some of my best ideas have come from those drives, many of them which I forget by the time I get home. On one of the night’s driving to her place, I came up with an idea….an idea to bring some of the best builds of year’s past (that were still around of course) and display them with some of what I feel are the best builds of our current generation with a couple of other cars that had yet to make a public appearance, which I would deem “The builds of the future”. Showoff is so enriched in history that it just made sense…I would call it “GENERATIONS”…it had a nice ring to it, so I went with it. I parked my 4Runner in my carport, ran up to my apartment, hopped on my computer and shot Tony from ItsJDMYo an email. I had somehow lost my contact info for Ken so I had no way of contacting him, and he wasn’t online at that moment, so I asked Tony to forward my idea to him. I was pretty excited by the idea but it almost seemed impossible to put together in less than a week’s time but if Ken liked the idea, I would push forward and do whatever it took to make it happen. Ken emailed me later that next day and told me that he felt that it was a great idea…and then it came time to execute…
The Chronicles and GENERATIONS represented on Big Mike’s Prelude passenger window…
What car was still around I thought, that people would appreciate seeing, that hadn’t been out at a car show like Showoff in a couple years…the first car that sprang to mind, within moments of thinking was Parnell’s 1993 Acura Integra. It was a beautiful build, timeless in every way, with all the right parts to make to relevant no matter what era it stood in. I didn’t know Parnell that well, we had met in passing, and I ran into him another time during a dinner with May and some friends at Fogo de Chau, and I almost didn’t recognize him. We became friends on Facebook after that, so my only means of contacting him was through a social media source. I am very good friends with Ejay though, who also had a DA like Parnell, so I knew I could always talk to Ejay if I had to. Ejay and Parnell are like brothers, if I had to have someone convince him to do it, Ejay was my man to do it. I hit Parnell up on Facebook and he quickly responded without hesitation that he was all for it. So the first guy was locked down….
Team Kosoku past and present…Parnell’s Mugen DA and Ejay’s DA…
The second guy I knew who might be down, was Kane Chan. He shows with all the other old school car crews at Showoff practically every year, so if I could piggyback off that, the whole “GENERATIONS” theme would make even more sense. Kane wasn’t sure what everyone in his crew wanted to do, so he said he would let me know after they had a meeting…so Kane was a “maybe”. I needed some help brainstorming ideas of who and what car to bring out, so I headed down to the Rywire facilities to meet up with Ryan, DPK David, and Big Mike. There we tossed around some names of who to ask…Mike G. was one of them, and a couple other names popped up, but we had no idea if those guys were even into cars anymore. Right next door to Ryan’s shop, if you didn’t know…was L*CON. Inside L*CON’s building was a smaller business, called Ballade Sports and was operated by Alex Doan, who has that full Spoon-themed black S2000 and a guy who has been a part of the Honda community for years, a guy we know as “Skinhead Mike”. Mike is the proprietor of Jon Tanji’s Civic hatchback. Jon passed away a couple years ago, and Mike has had his EG ever since. He occasionally takes it to work with him, and it has remained in its exact state since Jon had it…it was the perfect choice to bring to Nisei. We could honor not only the history with Jon’s Civic but also honor Jon Tanji, who many people these days don’t know of and to showcase his work. Big Mike talked to Skinhead, I talked to him for a bit, and while Mike was all for it and loved the idea, he had a personal matter to deal with and that was all I needed to hear. I’m not gonna make anyone do anything car-related if they have more pressing matters to attend to. When I first made the announcement regarding the appearance of Jon’s Civic, I kind of pulled the trigger on it too early by stating it would be there and that was my error. It should not reflect on Skinhead Mike or anyone else. I would have loved to have seen the car there, but it’s more important to me that he takes care of whatever he had to in his personal life. For those of you who expected the car to be there, I apologize, it was my mistake in jumping the gun and no one elses…
With little time left to get more of the Hondas from year’s past together, I hit up Matt from ICB Motorsport to see if he was coming out from Arizona for Nisei, and all of a sudden, everything fell into place. Literally out of nowhere, Matt single-handedly saved my vision…and he has no idea that he did…haha. Matt was bringing out 5 cars… one of them being perfect for the section, because it stood the test of time and has remained in perfect condition…no, it’s not the car that you’re thinking of if you’ve already seen other pics. It wasn’t the famous “blue EG”. It was Jorge Hernandez’s gold Civic hatchback. You don’t hear from him because he’s a man of few words, but his build is one that you will always remember. The other cars that were coming out with him were perfect for the “present” section of GENERATIONS. Mike had a very nice Spoon-themed EM1 build, and another guy, Jeff Campbell, had a blue DC2 that made a strong presence at Eibach this year. RC Chacon was set to debut his new 4-door EG Civic build, that no one had seen yet, and while it wasn’t finished, it was perfectly suited for the “future” section alongside Loi Song’s debuting red EG build. The fifth and final car, was either going to be Matt’s CRX Pro.2 on MF10Ls…or a build that he’s had in his collection for years now (since 2006), a blue EG that once belonged to famed-Honda head, Chad Castelo. Chad for whatever reason, has taken it upon himself to speak ill of me and my work to others who we have as mutual friends so it was interesting that Matt offered to bring it out to Nisei. Matt had no idea about this of course but I made it a point to ask him to bring out Chad’s car to display at Nisei. Chad has never spoken to me in person, nor does he even know me personally, but he’s taken it upon himself to say some unpleasant things about The Chronicles and the people associated with the site. I have always loved his cars. In fact, his 4-door EF build back in his Team Ziggy days was one of the builds that made me fall in love with Hondas to begin with. His EG was a landmark build as well and one of the reasons why I really wanted it there was because Jon Tanji was the main contributor in that build. When it came to custom engine bays and tucks, and what not, Chad’s Civic was one of those builds that you will always remember if you have been in this community for the last decade-plus. I have nothing bad to say about Chad and I’ve been nothing but respectful of his work throughout the years, that’s why I wanted his old car to be there at Nisei. It was a perfect fit, albeit an ironic one, for GENERATIONS. Matt told me that it was iffy getting Chad’s old car out there because it had been sitting in storage so long but I made it a point to make sure that it made the trip out….
The cars for the “present” section, were by far the easiest to get together. The Hondas from DPK, ATS Garage, along with Ejay’s DA, Salem’s TSX, and Big Mike’s Prelude, were perfect. They are at the top of their game and the builds are a great representation of the top builds today. I later got a call from Kane to inform me that his Civic coupe would indeed be parked with us and that rounded out the 22-car line-up perfectly. All that came together in just a couple days time, and when Ken saw the line-up at Nisei that Saturday morning, even he was impressed by what was accomplished in that short time…
GENERATIONS “Present” line-up….starting with DPK David, ATS Garage’s Ryan Der, Chris Sakai, Anh Truong, and Angel Ramos’ S2000 in the distance…
Now on to what I think was one of the most talked about topics that day at Nisei Showoff 2011…the foot traffic and overall attendance. It wasn’t busy by any means that day, and it didn’t have to be. I heard so many people complaining about how no one showed up and how there was barely anyone there at the show. There didn’t have to be an overwhelming crowd. When there are too many people, people complain. When there aren’t that many people,….people complain. You have to remember that Nisei Showoff hasn’t been that crazy busy in the last couple years because that’s not what it’s about. If you want it to be crazy busy, go to one of the newer shows like Spocom or something, where there are bitches flocking around everywhere and there is loud music and go-go dancers. That’s not what this show is about. Nisei Showoff has always been about tradition. Ken Myoshi isn’t stupid. He doesn’t do this show to make money. The Showoff franchise hasn’t been a cash-cow in years and Nisei Showoff is one of his last remaining events. Ken continues to do Nisei Showoff because it’s an important part of our automotive community’s history. Showoff is what started it all in the beginning and it’s one of the last remains of our rich past. Honestly, you could have 4 people show up at Nisei Showoff, and I wouldn’t give a shit. Why? Because I know those 4 people that walked into the show will have come for the cars and for the history. What other event can you go to where you will see cars from the old school crews like Bosozoku and Street Image Performance parked alongside the current generation of crews like DPK and ATS Garage? Only at Nisei Showoff. People who only complained about the foot traffic fail to see the significance of Nisei Showoff. You should come to appreciate the cars and the people from your community, and not whether or not someone is invading your personal space because there’s no where to walk. You know what I mean? Who cares if there wasn’t that much foot traffic? Are you selling something? Do you have money invested in this event? If your answer is no, then why worry about it? You should appreciate Nisei Showoff because Showoff is still around. The people you looked up to who were building the cars that you wanted to build went to Showoff events, and hopefully, one day, when your kids are into cars and building cars like the ones they watched you build, can say that they went to a Showoff event. You are a part of a bigger picture and if you think that Nisei Showoff was a failure because attendance was low, you’re not only selling the event short, you’re also selling yourself short. Appreciate what is around you. When you go to this show, take a step back and look at everything. There are people from the past uniting with the current crop of enthusiasts to share each other’s work. You shouldn’t have to worry about attendance because the guys that are there to see the cars at Nisei Showoff, are already there with their cars and they are parked right next to you…
Just a small glimpse at the GENERATIONS line-up…
People always joke around saying “oh I thought last year’s Nisei was the last one”, “every year is the last one”…that’s because it possibly could be. Ken continues to put this event on because the lot that it is held at every year is still available for him to use…one day it won’t be. The lot is owned privately and at any point in time, it will be torn down and there will be property built over it. Every year Ken calls to ask if the lot is available, and if it is, he will put the show on. It isn’t because he’s using the fact that it’s going to be the last show as a selling point for you to come. Next year, it may very well go into development. And someday, you may drive by that exact area and tell your kids or whomever, that it was the spot where one of the best import automotive shows was held all time and you miss the fact that there’s no more Nisei Showoff…
It’s sad to hear that I see some people on other sites complaining about media passes and how they weren’t “taken care of” properly. It’s that ridiculous sense of entitlement that exists these days that make kids think that the people at Showoff should roll out the red carpet for them. The Showoff events have made their mark in our industry. It doesn’t need some kid’s photos to make or break it. If you really appreciate what you do as a journalist, enthusiast, car head, or blogger, pay the $10 that it costs at the gate and walk your ass inside and take your photos. I walk into every event I go to not thinking about what I can do for the event. I cover events because it has helped me build my site and reputation into what it is today. That’s why my coverage is always very comprehensive, very detailed. I have total confidence in saying that nobody does event coverage better than I do because I don’t feel entitled to anything. Nobody owes me shit. I cover cars, and especially the people because I want people to be able to look back and remember the great times they had doing what they love. If you’re getting upset because you didn’t get a free pass, or didn’t get inside the event at a certain point in time because you think that event organizer needs to have you there, your site sucks and what you’re doing fucking sucks. There are thousands of people taking photos at events and covering what’s going on who don’t complain and just do it because they love it…
It’s a lot to read, but I hope you got through all of it…now we can move forward with the photos…
There was quite a bit of traffic on the way to downtown L.A. the morning of Nisei Showoff, so I got there a little later than expected. I don’t have very many photos early in the day because I was busy setting up the booth, as well as parking all the cars in our line-up the way I wanted them to be parked. The first part of the coverage today will cover my booth and the cars around it. My reasoning behind that is because I think what I put together at Nisei Showoff is important and you should see it and also because I stayed at my booth the majority of the early hours of the show….
A quick glimpse at the line-up… Ryan from Rywire was supposed to bring out his CR-X, but for the second straight year, his EF had what we call “The Nisei Curse”, and didn’t make it to the event…so he brought out his back-up, his white NSX on white Regamasters….not a bad back-up if you ask me…
While Ryan’s NSX was the book-end to the left side of The Chronicles booth, Big Mike’s Prelude served as the end on the right…
Our line-up was so big that day that we ended up taking up that whole side of the show. It was a lucky coincidence that my boy Billy’s IS300 ended up parking next to The Chronicles. Sportcar Motion’s red EG made it’s first official public appearance at Nisei Showoff and it was at the start of our 22-car line-up…
Northwest internet celebrity and retired Hmong gangster Yee Vang made the trip out from Washington to show his support at Nisei Showoff. Here he is with Big Mike in a rare photo of them together…
Jeff Campbell’s DC2 and Mike Schietroma’s EM1, both blue, both on Rega EVOs…
Ejay and Parnell’s DA Integras…They both dropped off their cars and quickly left to attend to family matters…
May usually brings out treats like cookies and what not for The Chronicles booth but she brought all kinds of fruits and juices to make drinks for everyone…
The ice cold fruit drinks were perfect being that the day ended-up hotter than anyone had imagined. The photo here is obscured because I took it through the mesh netting from our canopy…
Norman from AS1 probably saying something dirty to Fred Chapman from ATS…
DPK David and Ryan Der made sure to represent their sponsor, Falken Tire….
The two S2000s from our GENERATIONS line-up…
WheelFlip.com model Tina posing for a photo…
Danny from PlusOne was one of the guys that I should have asked to be a part of our line-up. I thought he would be with his crew so I didn’t even think to ask. It all worked out though because he ended up parked directly across from us…
Danny’s custom PlusOne Mugen MF10s sitting over his custom purple Spoon Sports calipers…
Chris Sakai showed up to Nisei Showoff with a set of Mag Blue TE37s and a couple of new touches under the hood…
Anh was on vacation so Fred Chapman brought his ITR out to Nisei…
Loved this slammed Radio Flyer that a loyal Chronicles reader brought by the booth…
Also across from The Chronicles booth was the WheelFlip.com booth… Alex had 3 different sets of M7s on display…
Nisei Showoff 2011 also marked the debut of the new Hershey brand DC2R bumper, seen here on Arn Reyes’ Integra… I’ve been following the build-up of this bumper since Alex Zhao started work on it and I have to admit that while I was sketchy about it in the beginning, it looks much better in person…
My only criticism is my disliking of the L.E.D. turn signals. Being that the original design is based off the GR-chassis Subaru STI, I felt that he should have left the OEM foglights intact…Still a novel idea either way though, and it’s definitely different…
DPK Jared and Big Mike spending a moment in the shade and having a drink…
Anh’s ITR proved to be one of the most looked-at builds in our line-up…
Arn not only debuted the Hershey bumper on his Integra, he also brought out his baby boy for the first time for everyone to see…Meet Anthony Reyes…
Little Anthony didn’t really appreciate the idea of someone picking him up…
Murdock and Sam Ip hanging out…Sam was a part of The Chronicles Nisei line-up last year. He had the white 8th gen. Civic SI sedan that he ended up wrecking later on in the year and now he’s building a black, all J’s Racing-themed, sedan…
My cousin Tim aka Timscribbles came out to Nisei to check out the rides…He’s a younger guy in our community but he’s a lover of all kinds of different automobiles and his blog shows all his adventures…
A couple of shots of Angel Ramos’ S2000….
Lowfat Pie with ekfour Tony Huynh’s daughter…Tony and family came back to Cali along with Steve Kwan (dagreenek) to hang and check out Nisei Showoff…
Tony from ItsJDMYo!!! rocking his old school 13Devils pit crew shirt…Tony and I used to be from that crew back in the day and I even had the banner on my car when my car was featured in Honda Tuning back in 2006…
I still miss Ryan Der’s kit on his EK but it’s looking slightly better with the black TEs back on it…
Again, Nisei was the debut of Sportcar Motion’s 330whp K24-powered Civic hatchback…this thing is a fucking beast…
RC Chacon also debuted his new 4-door EG sedan at Nisei, alongside Sportcar Motion’s red EG…You should remember RC from his previous build, which was the white hatchback with no hood, bright orange valve cover, and dump tubes exiting through the (non-existent) hood…The 4-door wasn’t anywhere near completion yet so he decided not to compete at Nisei, but it was cool to have the car out there nonetheless…
That’s all for today…gonna close it out today with another shot of Angel’s S2K….stay tuned for much more. I’ve actually gone through the majority of the photos already and we are looking at a 6-part series of Nisei 2011 Coverage. Make sure to come back tomorrow for part 2 and tell everyone out there that they will get the best, most comprehensive Nisei coverage only here on The Chronicles….
Spocom 2011 Coverage…Part 2…Finally…
*Probably NSFW… =P
If you guys are here looking for Nisei Showoff 2011 coverage, then you’re in luck…because I haven’t finished going through the photos yet and you won’t see any Nisei coverage today. In the mean time though, you can check out the rest of my coverage from the 2011 Spocom show at the Anaheim Convention Center that happened last week. Why are you only seeing part 2 now? Because I was organizing my booth and the set-up for “GENERATIONS”. Hopefully everyone enjoyed the line-up that I brought out. I’ll speak more about it when we actually get to the Nisei coverage tomorrow but today, you can get to see some sub-par shots from Spocom and random butts and tits and things. It was a cool event, but I’d be lying if I told you that I was looking forward more to this event then the upcoming Emotion show. Some of the photos below aren’t really safe for work, unless you work at a supermarket in which case, go to the lotion aisle, select your weapon of choice and assault yourself in the break area with these pics. Back tomorrow with part 1 of the epic Nisei 2011 coverage….For now, this should keep you occupado...I speak Spanish too… “Donde esta la biblioteca?” …..”Stickydiljoe.com tienes fotos de tetas y culos guay!!” See? Si? Fucking. Multi. Cultural.
I didn’t really stay at Spocom too long, I explained why in the first portion of this coverage so I won’t really bother repeating it. I’m sure you guys are here just to see photos anyways. Nothing much to say about Spocom, it was coo…
JGTC-styled widebody Z33 350Z…. This car has been around for a minute now and has gone through many different transformations throughout the years…Definitely not for everybody but the amount of hard work involved in putting it together should never be questioned…
STI and Evo X from High End/Auto Concept Elite…
My good friend Billy Shea’s IS300…this dude is like a brother to me and I’ve known him for years. Amazing to see what this car has become throughout the years and how it transformed from a much more tame, graphite grey pearl Chargespeed-kitted IS to this full blown HKS themed monster…
I believe this STI owner is from Washington or somewhere in the Northwest. This car is at every major import event in the west….
S2000 from Royal Origin…I know this because I have the rare ability to see that giant flag right behind it…
You know you’re a car guy when you look at this photo and the first thing you spot are those hideous wheels on that NSX…what are those? Primax wheels?…yuck…
Big Mike of course….so sad to see those black CE28s go…
White S2 on some white BBS LMs…
The photos below have been taken from the backside to protect the identities of those involved…
Look at dude’s hand moving south…haha
One of Tony from ItsJDMYo!!!’s new models…
S2000 from Team Ar-Kan that ended up winning the Best Honda award at Spocom…
Flame work on this Mustang was impressive…
Voltex-kitted Evo from Ar-Kan…
Linda from Team Praxis owns this Matrix that’s always a heavy hitter in the Toyota class at any import event…
Bimmer I’ll never own…
Always love seeing this Varis-equipped Evo X. I was just happy to finally get a good shot of it. At other events I’ve been to like Wekfest, this car is usually parked pretty tight with other cars and it’s hard to get a whole profile shot of it…
Nice color combo on this IS-F….Some day I’ll own an IS-F. At the amount of money I’m making now, it’s projected that I will own this car right around the year 2064…haha…
This was pleasant…
First spotted this khaki-colored 350Z at Wekfest Norcal…really simple aero on VIP modular wheels…
Seibon’s demo CR-Z with their custom front bumper…
Really liked the subtlety of the rear fender flare on this 370Z. Goes with the lines of the car perfectly and looks practically stock…
Our buddy Rom DJing on the 5Axis-built Scion…
Jon Jon’s IS…
The rest of non-car photos so be prepared to…
Corissa Furr…
…and of course, my favorite photo from Spocom 2011…
That’s all for the Spocom coverage. Happy I could finally get the update out finally…back tomorrow with part 1 of the Nisei Showoff 2011 coverage…
Thanks for looking…
Super Street FF Battle 3 Coverage…Part 3…
Track photos? We talkin’ about track photos? At a track EVENT?…Of course I don’t have track shots. It only makes sense that at FF Battle 3, an event held at Autoclub Speedway, that I wouldn’t have bothered to take any photos of the actual Hondas on the track. I really wanted to but time just didn’t permit it. When I initially got to Fontana at around 11am, the first practice sessions had ended and everyone was already working on their cars so none of them were on the track anymore. Then DPK David, Big Mike, and I headed out too lunch a couple hours later in hopes that we would be back for the first official recorded runs. Lunch ran a little long but we had got back right when it started so I grabbed my camera and headed to the stands to watch. Apparently, unlike years past, not all the gates to the stands were open and the two that we went to were locked up so we couldn’t even get to the stands to watch. Everyone had gone all the way around to the other end where the lone gate was open and if we were to make our way over there, we would miss it all completely. So I just decided to stand at the most elevated part of the staircase leading to the gate and watch from there. If I were to take any pictures, the cars would look like ants so it was pretty pointless…
Never fear though, because Loi Song from Sportcar Motion took some track photos and he told me last night that he would send them over to me so that I could post up here on The Chronicles. Once I get those, I will toss those up. In the mean time, continue to enjoy the pics from the pits as well as other vehicles that I spotted while walking around the “meet” portion of FF Battle 3. When we last left off, I was busy taking shots left and right of everything that I found interesting. Like the previous two installments, there are many detail shots included and not just exterior shots of the cars. And as always, the people that were involved with the entire event…enjoy…
Gilbert Corona’s EF ran into some minor problems after the first practice session…When I say “minor” I mean that he threw a rod and it went through his engine block…Nothing serious, right? Haha…it made for some interesting photos though when it looked like it was doing a rear wheel drive burnout on the oval of the Speedway. I talked to Gilbert about it while he was showing me shards of his block that were scattered throughout his engine bay. I told him to cheer up because it gave him instant street cred points and he told me to get the fuck out of his face…haha…okay he didn’t, but he was pretty bummed about blowing another motor…
Saw this clean hatchback roll up so I took a quick shot of it. Really simple, nothing too wild, and sitting on what looks like Blitz BRWs…
Morgan’s CTR with newly mounted “duc tapes”, at least that’s what Loi calls it…Why? Because Duc Tapes…
Lee Randle’s Integra Type R on Enkei ES Tarmac wheels…one thing that I’ve noticed about the FFSquad guys is that they love this particular wheel…
Was messing around with the camera and thought this was a pretty cool shot…owner and car both in the same shot…Probably would have been better if you could see the entire car but you get the point…
Phaze2 Salem’s J’s Racing front tow hook…
Jonathan Wong from Super Street chatting with FFSquad’s Jason Katman…Mr. Wong’s wife beater was a little transparent so I’ve taken the liberty of making this photo safe for work…
ATS FCB aka Fred Chapman and his son made the trek down from Norcal with a couple other ATS Garage members to show support to fellow ATS member, Ryan Der….
Ryan taking his passenger Bride seat out for some weight reduction…
Our buddy Mauricio drinking hot ass soup out of his gigantic thermos in 93 degree weather…
Henry Ng drove all the way down from Canada to participate in FF Battle 3 and his sideskirt probably regrets it…props to him for making that crazy trip…
This one is for the midwest/east coast guys…Rywire prepared for FF Battle 3 with a gourmet meal from the best restaurant in the world…..JACK IN THE BOX!…
Loi Song, Sean K. from Super Street, and Robert Green from Blueprint Racing…
Sergio’s H22-powered Civic…I wish I would have taken a photo of his bay because he actually has a Papa John’s pizza box blocking the opening next to his radiator to help direct airflow straight to it…pretty interesting idea…
Katman’s daily Accord…
Big Mike showed up an hour or so after we got there to check out the event…
Ryan Der sitting in his EK…
I guess he had some minor kinks with his AEM EMS that needed to be adjusted before he made his official run…so he called up Bisi…
…and the Bisimoto Roadside Assistance Mercedes G-wagon arrived…
Bisi Ezerioha making some fine-tuned adjustments to Ryan Der’s tune…
Salem’s TSX surprised everyone by doing very well at FF Battle 3…I’m proud of this guy for getting his car together and actually competing. When he called me the Thursday night leading up to the dyno sessions, his transmission was still in pieces so it was great to see that he made it and how well the car ran…
For those of you who have known me for any length of time, you know that I drive a 4Runner everyday…mine looks nothing like this one…haha. I can always appreciate a nice, clean 4Runner. With the one I’m driving getting older by the day and with the mileage nearing the 280K mark, I’m thinking about getting another one, same body style, but in much better shape. Throw a TRD supercharger on the 3.4L V6 along with some TE37s and call it a day…
After that the three of us headed out for lunch down the street at Farmer Boys. I didn’t take any photos there because I was hungry as fuck, so we will just move on. As I stated in the beginning of this post, we had a bit of a debacle trying to make our way to the stands so we just watched from afar…the next couple shots are when the competitors had finished and were coming back to the pit area…
Oscar Jackon Jr. rolling back to the pit area in Morgan Jade’s CTR…
The TSX back from it’s run…
This 4-door DB didn’t compete, but it did look good on the 949 Racing wheels…
There was a NASA event going on that day as well so there were all kinds of crazy cars littered throughout the track…this Mustang was parked in our lot so that was a little odd, but it looked pretty sick…
Tom-Attak in the most exciting shot of this post…
Sportcar Motion rocking the Skunk2 tent…
Transponder zip-tied to Salem’s tow hook to record lap times…
6 dudes watching Ryan check the air on his tires…Pictured are the Supertwinz, ATS Ron, Charlie from Top Setup, Matt from ICB, and Big Mike…Ryan is self explanatory…
Gary taking the TSX for a drive to make sure that the fix he made on the transmission cable was holding up…
A couple shots of Raul’s EG4 Civic…
Great build…weird how he didn’t have the 949 wheels on there…probably didn’t want to dismount the tires he already had on there…
+30 street cred points for having dirty TE37s…
Mike Chang from Evasive didn’t compete this year but he did bring his Civic Si out to show support…
Hugh Le’s NSX was easily one of the best looking Hondas at FF Battle 3…
The Tom-Attak family…
For those of you who stumbled onto this site looking for Christine Mendoza nip-slips, this is the site you’re currently at and no I don’t have any new pics…
DPK David talking to our buddy Jimmy Harris from San Diego…
OldManJames’ S2000…
One more Tom…
Salem knows that I’ve never been a real big fan of his black Desmond Promedas on his TSX but at this new lower ride height, it actually looks much better…
The Raceline USA Civic coupe was another car that ended up breaking on the initial practice run…It had transmission problems so Elton just decided to shut it down and not risk any further damage…
Rywire Rex…
Gonna close it out today with this shot of Nick and Ryan’s cars….Hopefully Loi gets those track photos to me and then I can throw them up for you guys. Other than that, Spocom is this weekend and I’ll be attending to see what the new Spocom is all about. I figured that I should go because they stole a photo of Amy Fay that I shot and used it on their Spocom tickets/flyers without asking me so I might as well go anyway. Maybe when they ask me for my ticket I’ll bring it up, haha…anyways, that’s all for today, thanks for looking…
Import Alliance 2011 Coverage…Part 8…The Conclusion…
Man, what a series of posts these have been…I fully expected to go the full ten parts but it just wasn’t necessary. Some photos ended up being duplicates and were trashed, while a lot of really good shots went to Honda Tuning and Super Street magazine for the print version of the IA coverage. Overall, I’m really happy with the results and how the whole coverage of the event was executed. I usually just put up the photos and then write on the fly and see how things flow but this time around, I made sure to take note of certain things in my mind when I was out in Nashville because I felt those topics were important to discuss. I’m pretty sure I covered every topic that I felt was necessary to touch upon so today, I will try something a little different and do sort of a “good, bad, and ugly style. This way I can put a final touch of the weekend and present you with the last bit of photos leading all the way up to the very end of my trip. For those of you who are new to the site, thank you for checking out The Chronicles and following the 8-part series of IA coverage. I hope you guys stick around because this site has much more to offer than just event coverage. For those who have always been around, man what can I say, you guys know how I cover events and I hope this one was the best yet. I wanted to give those of you who couldn’t make it out there a good sense of what things were like for us at IA. Thanks for your continued support of The Chronicles and I look forward to more adventures throughout the country. Maybe someday I’ll end up at an event in your area…
Alright, moving on…
THE GOOD -
Overall…The entire weekend was a great learning experience. I think I have a good grasp on what the car community is like as a whole and I really appreciate the fact that I finally got to see the cars in person. It’s cool seeing these cars online but it’s a completely different feeling when you finally get to see the best builds out there in real life, in a real world setting. No photoshop, no crazy cover-ups or fixes, just the builds themselves. Some of them looked more “raw” when they aren’t glamorized in a fancy setting in a photograph but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I went into the IA trip knowing that I would learn a great deal about the scene outside of the west coast and I wouldn’t have done things any differently…
PG+K…I love these dudes man…Always so generous and always done to extend a hand to make me feel welcome. I told BonB and Jay when they were out here that they could hit me up for anything while they were out here and I would do my best to accommodate them. I wanted these guys to be taken care of while they were out here and make sure that their experience was a good one. That way they could take their experience home with them and remember the good times they had whenever they traveled to the west. I never expected anything in return but these guys took care of my and the rest of the guys that went out there ten fold. They were more than hospitable and often went out of their way to help us out. They are one of the reasons why our trip out there was a good one. From the moment I stepped off the plane, Jay was already waiting at the airport to pick my ass up. Then they made sure that I was fed and then Jay again returned to the airport to pick up Big Mike. Whenever we needed to go eat or something, or use their rooms for whatever reason, they helped us out without question. I couldn’t have asked for better hosts. Anyone that’s willing to go out of their way to make sure that I’m okay is a good homie to me, you know? It’s always a good time chatting it up with them too and I genuinely enjoy their company each and every time I see them. Jay, Bon, Moe, Squirk, EG Mike, and the rest of the guys, all classy dudes and I’m honored to know them. They are an amazing representation of enthusiasts out in the east coast and the south. Thank you guys for everything…
The Canadians… Arthur Malczewski and Chris Scarangella. I gotta thank these dudes and Arthur in particular for always being down to drive us around anywhere, whether we needed to go to the store, eat, or get picked up from the other hotel…these guys saved us from having to rent a car and drive everywhere in unfamiliar territory. It was cool being able to experience Import Alliance with these guys as well because they offer a different perspective than what we are used to. We gave Arthur a lot of shit for the way he drives but as crazy as he drove, we really appreciated the fact that he did. Chris’ CR-X build is possibly going to be one of the great CR-X builds of our time so make sure to keep an eye out for his project when it’s completed…
The people…Everyone that we met, we met with great appreciation. We learned what “southern hospitality” truly was and everyone that we encountered had great things to say, whether it be about the west, The Chronicles, Big Mike, Rywire, anything. I was honestly very surprised by the out pour of support that we got when people realized that we were out there for IA. I had a sense that people were really happy to see us and we just had a good vibe from everyone throughout the weekend. I started this site just as a little project to keep me busy and it’s crazy how people know so much about us down to the little details. People really remember what they read on this site and it’s crazy. I wanted this site to be a positive influence on the Honda community and from meeting total strangers out in a place I’ve never been to, I can honestly say that this site has helped to slowly kill that stigma that exists between the two coasts…
The homies... For me personally, the people around me can either make or break a trip. For being out in Nashville, in the sweltering heat for the first time, experiencing new things, I couldn’t have asked for a better group of dudes to be with. While it would have been great to have the girls out there with us, it was cool to get the complete IA experience with Rywire Ryan, DPK David, and Big Mike. It was also cool to have Loi and Jade out there with us to share some laughs….
THE BAD-
Not really too much bad stuff to talk about. While I went in with no expectations, I gotta say, I was pleasantly surprised with everything. The immaturity that ran rampant at the La Quinta parties was a bit of a turn-off for me but that can easily be resolved by just avoiding that whole area in general. You guys have heard me talk about it before in the previous posts….I’m all for partying and having a good time, but making an ass of yourself and destroying property as well as putting others in danger by hurling beer bottles at them is not a good thing. It’s a responsibility of every person to party within reason and to not get out of control and put others in harm’s way. At some point you have to open your eyes that what you’re doing may be destructive and there are consequences to every action…
The flight itself to and from Cali to Nashville was definitely a bad thing for me. It really wasn’t anyone’s fault but getting out there was just a total fucking pain in the ass. I almost felt that it was going to ruin my entire trip but once I got out there, it was an after thought. Just having to travel a day early and make extra stops in different cities was just a horrible experience. While I like going to different places to see new things, after a certain point, an airport looks like an airport and 20-30 minutes in each city isn’t really going to teach you anything new. We all planned this trip to fly out together and we all ended up going on different planes to different cities, it was just a horrible experience…Fuck flying in general though, it sucks. I hope if you guys ever try to get out here to the west coast that you have a better experience than me…
THE UGLY-
Some of the cars left a little something to be desired. While there were some great cars, there were some REALLY bad ones that were hard to look at. That’s what comes with going to such a huge event though with so many different people from different parts of the country. You’re going to get a different mix of styles, new and old, and a lot of the times you’re going to see some hideous builds. It made for an interesting experience though, sometimes you have to see the really terrible cars to truly appreciate the good ones.
The heat was pretty wild. I can’t really say it was “bad” per se, because it didn’t affect our trip in any way. It was actually better than we expected and even people from the area were saying that it was better this year than year’s past. I didn’t even get sunburnt or anything so that was a great thing because I often get a little burned while I’m at an even out here. It’s just the nasty humidity that makes you feel gross just walking around the entire weekend. I just hate that feeling that I’m sticky and that my clothes in drenched in sweat. Luckily we had the paddocks that provided shade and a nice breeze for us. The humidity also made it a little hard for me to breathe but that’s just what goes with being in that area so I can’t really complain. I just put this in the “ugly” category because it’s just not something I’ll ever get used to…
This is definitely not “Ugly” by any means, but I had to post it here because it was just totally random… People fucking LOVE CCWs out there. I get that CCW had a booth out there but people just love the wheels over on the east coast. Many cars that weren’t even in the booth were rocking CCW wheels. We see a couple sets out here too but over there, it’s one of the main wheels of choice. There were sets of these wheels everywhere you looked. In the bigger spectrum of things, it doesn’t seem like very many but just from simple observation and from looking at photos online, I’m sure you can gather that it was a very popular wheel for enthusiasts there….
And the whole Jack in the Box thing…wow. That’s all I have to say…haha. I think I might go eat some Jack in the Box now, but I’m not going to call my parents and tell them about it, if you catch my drift, haha. ..
Okay, now on with the photos…
The VW truck from Seen It! definitely goes into the “good” category for me because it’s one of the highlight builds of my trip out there. Very cool to see this build with the K-swap and all…
This S2000 on Lambo wheels was one of the cars that I didn’t see the first day at IA. It was also one of the cars that placed in the “best engine bay” category of IA…I have a shot of it but I saved it for publication…
IS on BBS wheels…
Spotted this Accord with good wheel fitment and rocking a Chronicles sticker…haha. Nice simple bay too…
Another car I didn’t see on day one…This root beer colored S2000 was turbocharged, on Work VS-XX wheels and even had an A&W root beer logo on the valve cover…
Tiger’s turbo EP3…
Very clean EG with a K-swap on TEs…
Ben Torres actually woke up from his alcohol-induced coma and this was the first thing he told me to look at…While her clam was millimeters of cloth away from being exposed, it would be hard to appreciate because the Dodge Neon she was posing on was one of the most hideous cars I have ever seen…
S14 on Work Equip wheels…
Prelude on SBC Enkei RPF1s…
The bay on this VW was pretty sick, basically just a floating motor…
When wheel fitment goes wrong….definitely goes into the “ugly” category…
Really deep, concave wheel on the rear of this Z33…
Crazy looking dude with an umbrella, a Canibeat bag, and a ginger mullet!!…
One final shot of Anthony Smith’s EG6…
…as well as a couple final shots of the JDM Accord Wagon…This car was definitely one of the highlight cars of the trip…
Rywire and B.L.T. Ben Torres, alive and well…
Pretty random shot but this is a display K-motor that was in the K-Tuned booth…
Really liked this Civic from New York…
This was an interesting look…
A group of NSX owners…
I wonder what wheels are on this S2000…hmmmm….
I think this photo is a pretty good representation of what Import Alliance has to offer…a lot of two-toned engines bays and a lot of two-toned dudes…
Both are pretty subpar shots of Cristian Loza’s EP and I couldn’t decide which one I should post so here are both of them….
Liked this EG a lot so I took another shot of it…
8th gen. Civic on “Canibeat Edition” CCWs…
Absolutely no fucking idea why this was happening or what purpose it was supposed to serve…Almost as mind-boggling as putting garbage ass Varrstoen knock-off TE37s on a R33 Skyline…
EK on some teal SSR Competition wheels…
R33 Skyline drift car…
Alright so at this point, Don Napier comes by the Skunk2/Sportcar Motion booth looking for me because he wants me to go check out the awards ceremony. I didn’t have much time left because I had a early flight to catch, but I walked over to check it out…
Omari announcing the awards for Best Engine Bay, Best Valve Cover, etc. with the winners winning 100 bucks…
The crowd at “the winners circle”. This area was checkered black and white and made the sun fucking hot as ever…It was around 4pm or so when this was happening so the sun was beating down hard…
Luckily one of the Canibeat guys was holding one of their huge flags so I stood behind it to block the sun from beating down on my head…I’ve been one of the guys who has been more critical of the Canibeat site in the past but I like their new logo and the further development of their brand. That and I really enjoyed the shade this guy provided, haha…All the Canibeat guys were there because the awards were presented by them as well as guys from S3 magazine…
Two of the winners for Best Engine Bay…
One of the winners in the Best Valve Cover category…the white EP on the right had a really detailed valve cover. I really wish I would have taken a photo of it but at that point it was hot as shit and I really had to get out of there because I had a flight to catch so I totally forgot about it…
While we’re on the topic of the awards, I figured I would talk about the whole “Best Engine Bay” debate. Apparently the owner of the blue Civic coupe, Joe Maguschak, wasn’t selected by the S3 magazine staff as a winner because his car was trailered there and there was a slight crack in the bay (from when they were adjusting the suspension). For reference, this is the Civic I’m talking about…
In all honesty, I really don’t give a shit about the awards and who won because I wasn’t one of the contributing parties who decided who won. I also didn’t own any car in competition so it wasn’t much of a concern to me. Before I left the Nashville Super Speedway, Greg from S3 approached me because he wanted to know my opinion on the whole thing. He felt that the VW truck deserved to win and I agreed, and he felt that the blue CR-X, in above photo, also deserved to win because it was a “track car”. I really don’t know if it’s really a track car or not, but from the looks of it, it doesn’t look like it’s ever seen a track. If it has then it is a testament to the quality of the bay because it’s shaved and hasn’t cracked YET. If it hasn’t ever seen the track and the owners merely said that it was a “track car” then it’s hard to say if it deserved to win. I really don’t even know why that is even in consideration. If you have a “best engine bay” award, then make it a “best engine bay award”, not a “best engine bay on a running car” award or “best engine bay because it has street cred” award, you know what I mean? It’s really hard to essentially “disqualify” someone from competition just because his car was trailered there, especially when it’s for a “show” award category. If you’re going to not give someone an award because the other person drove his car there, then you need to specify that the next time you want to give awards to people. I’m going to be perfectly blunt, it’s pretty ridiculous. I love Nick Weir’s VW truck….but I can see why selecting him as an award winner would seem completely biased because Greg, who judged the category is a very good friend of Nick’s. It would be a totally biased decision but his truck is honestly very well built and it probably deserved to win an award. He drove his truck there, but he also took his Work CR-01s off and drove the truck back to Chicago on stock wheels. Do you then disqualify him from winning “best engine bay” because he drove his car on stock wheels? You get what I’m saying? It’s very hard to disqualify someone just because of certain criterias that are totally unrelated to judging an engine bay itself and the amount of labor involved in completing the bay. The CR-X won because it had a shaved bay and it was a track car. “Track” car. I’ve never seen it on the track, it doesn’t even look like it has a hood that would close and clear that intake manifold so do you then disqualify him because he can’t close his hood? Or maybe even because there is no proof that the owner tracks the car? See, it’s hard to judge a category based on conditions that don’t have anything to do with said category. It just doesn’t make any sense. Again, I honestly do not care, because I wouldn’t have judged it that way, but since Greg asked me, I feel that I should touch on it. That’s like saying the person that won “best valve cover” shouldn’t have won because they trailered their car….I don’t have any direct relation to any of the parties involved with the “best engine bay” competitors but I would have picked the Civic coupe to win just out of sure labor and execution…
So after that quick talk with Greg, we really had to leave because I had a 6pm flight to catch. The show was pretty much coming to a close though and cars were being loaded up and others were already leaving the venue. Big Mike ended up staying an extra day so he got a ride from someone else, and Ryan was staying a couple extra days down in Georgia so he took off with the PG+K homies. DPK David and I then hopped into the CR-V with Arthur and Chris and it was off to the Nashville airport…
The trip to Nashville was fucking terrible so I really hoped that we could get home to Los Angeles without any issues, but of course, that was too much to ask for…We flew out from Nashville and stopped over at Denver only to realize that my flight was once again delayed and I would have to wait over an hour before I could get another flight home. When we originally booked our flights, David had actually booked a different return flight home from Denver and was flying out to the smaller airport in Orange County while I was set to fly into LAX (Los Angeles International). The two flights were only minutes apart so we grabbed a quick bite to eat at Quiznos inside the airport, then rushed over to the front desk of our airline to see if I could just hop on David’s flight back. We told them of my horrible experience getting there and David was able to convince the lady to give me a seat on his flight. It worked out in the end because May was already hanging out with Jackie, so they didn’t have to drive separately to pick each of us up….
The flight after that was smooth and issue free. I was just happy that I didn’t have to deal with another delay and got home at a reasonable time. This is the final shot of the 8-part IA 2011 coverage….we arrived back in Long Beach, California at around 10:30pm pacific standard time, and the girls came and took us home…
All in all, it was a great time. The events leading up to Import Alliance was pretty hectic but everything else I wouldn’t have changed one bit. Thank you to Don Napier and the Import Alliance staff for putting this event on every year. While I’m not 100% sure if I’ll ever make it back out there again, I’m glad I was able to experience it at least once. Thank you also to all of you for supporting the Chronicles and checking out my content every day. It’s because of you guys that I’m able to make trips like this and see our ever-expanding automotive community from varying perspectives.
That’s a wrap on the IA 2011 Coverage….”y’all come back now, ya hear?”
Import Alliance 2011 Coverage…Part 7…
Welcome back to the 2011 Import Alliance coverage…we are definitely winding down to the close of the IA 2011 photos and it’s been quite a ride. There aren’t too many photos left, so today you can consider this one the “lifestyle” portion of the coverage where I give you guys who didn’t attend IA a glimpse of the people, the food, and some other random things that I saw along the way. The previous posts, minus part 6 of course, was heavy on the cars and if you guys follow The Chronicles regularly, you know that I try to cover everything. I saw some people on the forums asking about the females or whatever at the show and while I’m not real big on just taking a bunch of photos of random ass girls, I tried to get some shots just because inquiring minds want to know. I think after this post, there should only be one more batch of photos I need to post up and that will conclude the coverage. I know many of you are viewing The Chronicles for the first time because of the IA 2011 pics, but I do hope that you guys stick around for the long haul and continue to see what this site has to offer. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised…
Okay, so after we last left off, we were at the close of day one and people partied, cops showed up and just hung out with people instead of enforcing the law, and Ben Torres aka B.L.T. was sodomized and date raped in a bathtub by Mexi Zac Efron Downstairs Bolt Guys Frank. Then we went to Waffle House where we ate and talked to some of the locals and then retired to our rooms to get some rest. Oh, before I go any further, I think I should address the hotel that DPK David and I stayed at. Originally the plan was for everyone to stay together in a room but once I decided to go to Nashville for IA, I opted to get my own room. One of the main reasons was because I actually wanted to sleep and not deal with crazy asshole party people knocking on my door every 20 minutes and the other reason was simply because I don’t want to stay in a room with like 5 dudes and two beds. I’m a little bit older now and I guess you can say that I’ve lived with certain “expectations”. Meaning that I’d rather pay extra and just sleep in a bed on my own and not on a floor. The whole idea of sleeping in rotation just to share a bed to save some money is just ridiculous to me. The airfare to Nashville was bad enough as it is but still, a room isn’t even that much. It’s just a personal preference of mine, if you like to do that to save money that’s fine. A room next to the La Quinta, aka The Ramada, is $60 dollars per night. How much was the La Quinta that was trashed? Uhh…like $90 a night. If you split that room with 4-5 people, what is that, like…20 bucks each person to stay in a shithole per night? No thanks. I’ll pay the extra 40 and go sleep my ass in a bed and not have to worry about all that shit associated with staying with other people. I split with David because there are two beds, so you know how much I paid to stay at a hotel for that weekend? $60. 20 bucks per night at the other hotel with other dudes..for two days…is 40 dollars. So you stayed at a hotel that was trashed, went through random fire evac because some asshole was pulling the fire alarm, and if you decided to walk outside for any reason, possibly got hit in the head with a glass bottle……..just to save TWENTY DOLLARS. The Ramada wasn’t anything to brag about though, the room was pretty old looking, but it had a living room and kitchen so even if someone else decided to stay with us, they could have had the couch to sleep on. The fridge looked like a serial killer once used it to store body parts, but we just used it to keep our Gatorades cold, so that’s fine. It even has one of those oblong toilets, you know, the ones that aren’t small as fuck? I am not packing any kind of crazy heat so I’m not even going to attempt to act like my dick is huge but you guys know what I mean; when the toilet is so fucking small, that you have to hold your penis up just so your shit doesn’t touch the rim of the toilet. I fucking hate that and The Ramada was kind enough to accommodate me with a toilet that was “touch-free”. Other than that, the A/C was blasting cold and I didn’t have a fucking drunk Honda enthusiast passed out in my fucking tub, which is wonderful. They even had these little donuts and waffles for breakfast in the mornings so if you ever decide to go to Import Alliance, stay the fuck away from the La Quinta unless you want to sodomize a drunk person, drink 14 30-packs of Bud Light, and get glass hurled at you. The Ramada is walking distance and it’s quiet. There are also other hotels near the La Quinta as well, like a Courtyard Marriott and some other random ass hotel across the street from the Waffle House. I think it’s called the Avery or some shit but that motherfucker looks haunted as hell so I don’t recommend staying there at all. Ramada is kind of shitty, but it’s 60 bucks and you can’t really argue with that….
Okay, so on to the coverage. We woke up the next morning super late, because DPK David decided that it was a good idea to forget how to use his iPhone alarm and slept through it. Big Mike and Ryan were already back at the event, so we hurried and chowed on some donuts and headed back to day 2 of Import Alliance with our Canadian friends Arthur and Chris. Another thing that I should mention that I learned from my IA trip, is that Canadian people not only talk very differently from both Cali and Midwest folk, but it’s also apparently okay for them to turn around completely when they’re talking to you while driving. This is a blatant generalization that is incorrect on many many levels, but our friend Arthur Malczewski, was driving us around the whole weekend and whenever we were talking to him, he would literally turn around completely and talk to us like he wasn’t behind the wheel. In all honesty though, he saved our asses and drove us around everywhere so we didn’t have to rent a car. Much love for that… So we cruise up to the show and on the second day, Import Alliance is significantly smaller in size. People either partied all night the night before, or they just go to IA for day one and then head home. There was still a very large crowd of cars there, it just didn’t cover the entire Nashville Super Speedway. There was also free track runs going on so cars could no longer just park on the track. I kinda looked forward to a smaller grouping of cars because it gave me a chance to see everything. I still didn’t though, but I saw as much as I could. I didn’t worry so much about getting photos the second day because I had taken so many the day before so I was more relaxed…
Spotted this EG that I don’t remember seeing the first day…Nice and clean with Mugen RnRs…
Big Mike wearing his “FURK” shirt…haha…no really though, you know what it means…
I thought this was a cool shot…
This FD3s was posted up behind the paddocks just begging for a photo so I bit…
Just can’t get enough of Anthony Smith’s EG6…
….as well as this S14, which caught my eye the moment I got off the plane and saw it in the La Quinta parking lot…
Yellow DC2 on Stark Rennsports…
This NSX needs no introduction…
Big Mike and DPK David walking…
“Minty Fresh” Civic on CCWs and silver bay…
Another shot of this Integra at the Track.One booth…
LS1-powered FD3s RX-7…you can spot DPK David chatting with Kyle Smith and Damon Young, the owners of the two S13s I posted up in Part 6….
Damon’s S13 with 180SX Type X front…
“Flush” Honda Fit on CCWs…
Speaking of wheel fitment…we spotted this “stanced-out” Prelude and I was staring at the wheel and thought to myself…
…”Wow that’s a pretty intense stretch…”…then I thought something looked weird, took a closer look…
…and uhh…is that the inner lining that protects the bead of the tire BURSTING OUT? The fuck? That’s pretty dangerous…Whoever mounted this wheel really didn’t notice that the tire was so stretched that the inside of the tire is forcing itself out?…
There were definitely some random ass looking people there at IA…I saw a dude that even had the Password: JDM logo tattooed onto his chest but that doesn’t beat this dude…he looks like the guy from that one Billy the Exterminator TV show…
8th gen. Civic coupe on red BBS wheels…
Spotted this green DC2 on gold Volk CE28s…has every rear suspension brace in existence apparently…Good looking car though…
Mazda Miata on gold Work Equips…
Never been much of a fan of the whole splatter paint thing, especially on stock Civic DX steelies, but this one contained some pretty “interesting” designs…haha…
Some of you guys were wondering what the females looked like out there so here you go…
I apologize because the shots weren’t that great but I really wasn’t there to take photos of random girls…
During the first day of Import Alliance, we didn’t really get a chance to eat because David and Ryan were busy running the Rywire booth and I was so busy standing in the dreadful heat that I didn’t even feel like eating. Big Mike ended up going to a private lunch with Don Napier, one of the founders of IA and the Canadian homies we were with were running around doing their own thing. Since it wasn’t that busy on day two and we were hungry, we all decided to try out some of the food at the track…
Saw this dude rocking some pulled pork nachos and that shit looked really good, so I ended up ordering the same thing…
DPK David can never make up his mind on what he wants to eat…
…so he ended up ordering what was probably the worst thing on the menu…chicken strips and french fries…
Had no idea that they were actually called “Sammiches” out there…
Ryan with his fried chicken wrap or some shit…
While we were eating and people watching, I saw this crazy ass shit…Some dude mounted a shopping cart to his roof rack or whatever and then had this girl climb inside of it, and then she actually got up, and the dude walked on the roof of his car, and sat in it…why they thought it was cool? I have no idea…
After we ate and chatted for a bit, it was back to cars…
Dave from Hybrid Racing’s 370Z on Wedsports…
180SX taillights with carbon kevlar RPS13 light garnish…
Rear shot of the S15 Silvia on aggressive Volk GT-Us…
Sorcery NSX cruising around the paddocks…
Boosted 4-door on CCWs…
Jay from PG+K and his creepy moustache…
This dude stood on his head for like 20 minutes just to get a free t-shirt or some shit…I was really banking on someone walking by and just ripping a fart into his mouth but we can’t always get what we want…
Really liked this engine bay shot of Cristian Loza’s EP3….Mugen everywhere…
Jay’s J’s Racing wing…
Ben’s friends didn’t want him to miss day two of Import Alliance so they made sure to bring him along…here he is passed out comfortably on this dude’s legs…
Closing it out for today with two more shots of the K-swapped Jackson supercharged Integra that was recently featured in Honda Tuning magazine…
That’s it for Wednesday…thanks for looking and check back tomorrow for the shocking and unbelievable (not really) conclusion of IMPORRRRRT ALLIANCE 20-ELEVENNNNN…
Import Alliance 2011 Coverage…Part 6…
Somebody jerked off in the parking lot….
That’s all you really have to know about the type of shit that goes on at one of these post-IA parking lot parties at the La Quinta. Apparently, somebody thought it was hilarious to beat off in the parking lot in front of everyone…and that was just on the first night before the event even took place. Haha, whether it’s true or not, I’ll never know. I actually don’t want to know. If somebody decided that it was cool to whip that shit out and start attacking it like it owed him money, then be all means, have at it…but I don’t want to see or hear about it, haha. The fuck is wrong with people these days? Really…For the most part, the partying the first night was pretty uneventful. Hotel management asked the police to come by and shut it down and again, for the most part, people chilled after that. The second night was a bit different, and I’ll tell you more about it further down in this post. May actually really wanted to come to IA with me but since my whole trip was so poorly planned and airfare wasn’t exactly the cheapest, I thought it was best to just tread the IA waters with a couple of the guys, just to see how it was like. Plus I really wanted to get that “complete” experience you know. Figure out how everybody else does IA and see what they were raving about. When it came to Import Alliance, I couldn’t have been happier with the event. When it came to the parties and extra curricular stuff outside of the actual meet itself, I was less than impressed. It wasn’t like the dude jacking off in the parking lot or whatever turned me off from the whole thing, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s just because I’m a bit older now and I’m over the partying stage. From 21-25 or so, I did it all you know. What these guys were doing at the hotel is pretty much an equivalent to like the “college” experience, where you get drunk and go to frat parties or house parties and just act like complete assholes. It’s cool, I get it and again, more power to you but it’s just not for me anymore. Some of the stuff was humorous but the other stuff was just plain juvenile and childish…oh and also pretty dangerous. I think if we had brought the girls along with us for the trip, they wouldn’t be having more than 15 minutes of that shit. Not that they aren’t down, because these girls know how to party too but being in a crowd of what is probably 80-85% males who are drunk and acting retarded is not the best environment for women to be in. I really just wanted to get a sense of what things were like so we stuck it out and hung out with everyone to experience the parties at La Quinta…
If anything I feel bad for the manager of the hotel. We actually stood at the front desk and talked to her for awhile just to see what she had to say about it. She admitted that she knew what she was getting into with the whole Import Alliance thing since this was her third straight year hosting a majority of the crowd. The money is good. I don’t know how busy that part of Nashville gets but I doubt they have that significant of a crowd every weekend booking up all the rooms there. We asked her if there were other people staying there that weren’t apart of the IA crowd and she said that there indeed was. I ran into an older couple who were waiting for an elevator and some dude like blew one of those plastic trumpet-style horns right into her face and she was pretty upset about it. The manager said that when people book rooms that weekend, they are notified of the “conditions” and what goes on there so they have fair warning of what’s going on. So the people that chose to stay there, I don’t feel bad for, because they knew what was going on and less than a mile down the way, there was a hotel that’s nice and quiet and half the price (where I stayed). They could have easily stayed there but the manager said they opted to stay there anyway. What’s terrible is the amount of clean-up that goes into these type of events there at the hotel. One of the elevators broke after the first night so everyone was stuck riding one elevator where the lights were pulled out so people were crammed into one elevator and stood there in the pitch dark. Fire extinguishers were all fucked with, the parking lot was a mess, and the list just goes on…I can’t even imagine what the rooms looked like. But apparently it’s worth it to the La Quinta management because they continue to put up with it…
Anyways, let’s start the coverage, I’ll tell you more about the parties later on. We’re picking up around the time when Big Mike, DPK David, and I were walking on the other half of the lot right next to the main section. This section as I mentioned in Part 5, hosted some of the more uhh…”whatever” cars. There were some gems in there but you had to look for them. The rest of them were either incomplete or like, relics from the early 2000s style of imports. Halfway through my walk, I indeed found some gems. And these three cars were perhaps some of my favorites of the entire weekend. Nothing too crazy, but style doesn’t always have to come in brunches. You can build a nice, simple car, and it’ll send a bigger message than any crazy over the top project…
Love at first sight…man, you know how you go to a club where there are like tons of wack ass looking girls and you see one that’s decent-looking but in that moment, she’s incredibly hot? Well that’s called “hot by association”. When you come back to the real world she’s no longer that hot anymore but in that moment, she’s a 10/10. There were a ton of builds like that at IA. Not “great” by any means, but in that moment, it was one of the best builds there…these three cars…are by no means “hot by association”. These cars are the ones that you can appreciate at any event, in any state, on any coast. Very strong words, I know, but simplicity is the key…
FD3S, nothing crazy on the aero-side, just Volk TE37SLs without the red spoke decal and under the hood…
..GM LS1-swap…don’t really need much more after that. It’s a beast…
This was actually the first car I spotted out of the three. I went up to it and just stood and stared at it, then the owner, Kyle Smith, came up to me and asked me if I was StickyDilJoe…I said I was and he told me he was a big fan of the site, which I was kind of surprised by and said that he’s been following it for quite some time. I told him that I appreciated it and he was just a real quiet, humble type of dude. I told him how much I liked his car and how it made my day to see the three of them parked out there. The car is very straight to the point. It has an SR-swap, which he said looked terrible so he didn’t pop his hood, bronze TE37s, and a complete JDM OE 180SX Type X kit. I don’t know if many of you are familiar with this but the 180SX (or our 240SX hatchback) was in production in Japan up until 1998 when it ceased production. The Type X (and also a Type R model) was the last incarnation of the 180SX and had this front bumper, front lip, sideskirts, rear valance, and taillights. You want to talk about “JDM” style, it doesn’t get anymore “JDM” than this right here…and he doesn’t even have to wear a stupid ass t-shirt that says JDM on it…
The front end with the Type X front and what I call the “double Forest Whitaker” …you know, the lazy eyes…haha…so fucked up…
Late model 180SX JDM tails and rear add-on pieces…perfect wheel fitment too…
Kyle’s buddy was the owner of the black 180SX convert, which was featured in Modified Magazine awhile back…this one is probably the more refined one of the two but both are great looking S13s…
TE37s in what looks like “Formula Silver” finish…
Ever seen a Nissan with a NEXT! Miracle Cross Bar?…
The interior…note the APEX’i Power FC control unit, Bride door panels, floor mats, and gauges…very nice…
This photo came out kinda shitty cuz I had high hopes for it…
After stopping and chatting with those guys for awhile, we moved on to see what else we could find…
J32-swapped CR-X…I wish I could show you a close-up of the motor, it was so worn down and corroded…looked like the car that this motor came out of was submerged in water for a long time or something…still cool nonetheless…
This was cool…I think at that point CCWs were like a sharp pointy knife slowly digging into my rib cage but it look good on this hatch. Bay is decent, tucked but still needs a couple things here and there like a custom fuel set-up and some moving of certain items. Good looking car though…I have another shot of it from the second day of IA that I really liked but I’ll post that later on…
240SX drift car (I’m assuming) on a trailer…
I thought the wheels on this Civic were cool…even the smaller bolts along the lip were spikes as well….
Accord wagon and Civic from V Race Works…
Widebody S2000 from Illmotion…uhh, I’m sure there’s a joke or caption I could toss in here with the girl hold the pole and her hair waving around in the breeze but I’m just going to leave it alone…
Joe Maguschak once again…At this point a lot of people had left so I could finally get a shot of this car from a distance…
Really liked this shot of the firewall on his coupe…
I’ve always had a vested interest in this NSX because it resembles Phaze2 Tony’s NSX in many ways. Both were red at one point and both are rocking Sorcery aero, with this one being different because of the flip lights… I didn’t really expect it to be at the event but when it showed up I went over to take a closer look at it…
Great looking build overall, in many ways it’s much more refined than Tony’s. Tony’s NSX is more raw and just sounds really intimidating. This one is much more subdued, and everything is more streamlined. I really like the rear diffuser on it as well…
19-inch Work S1 2-Piece wheels…the true 3-piece has a different face with exposed bolts…
One of the rare VIP-themed rides at IA. This one is a Y33 Q45 with a Version Select kit and AME Shallen FX wheels…
…next to it was an even rarer sight…a VIP styled Acura RL…
Subaru STI on some aggressively sized Enkei RPF1….
Boosted single cam Civic…
C-West-kitted RX-7 getting worked on…
Honda Fit on some purple Mugen wheels…
Civic on some 949s…
The IS300 that I took a bunch of photos of outside moved into the paddocks towards the end of day one…
Supercharged RSX on Wedsport TC105N at the Hybrid Racing booth…
LS1-swapped G35 at the Chasebays booth. I didn’t take a shot of the rest of the car because it was like stock height and incomplete…
Matt Tucker’s EK9…Someone told me he had like 5000 friends on Facebook so I checked….this dude now has his own fan page…haha…Guys got more friends than Big Mike and HeyMikeyyyy. He’s like the Tila Tequila of Facebook…
K-swapped DC2 at the K-Tuned booth…
One of my favs again…Anthony Smith’s EG6…
PG+K Moe…
Zerolift booth with stock that on the west coast, would be the seized-property of the state of California…haha…
BonB from PG+K’s Civic as he was getting ready to take off to go eat at Tiger’s Pho spot…
Shot with my 10mm lens, that’s why it’s all crazy distorted looking. It’s actually just a normal Work S1 wheel used to hold Mike Zusin’s business cards…
Corvette at the Track.One booth…
Mike Burroughs and friends…If the name doesn’t sound familiar, you’ll probably remember one of his more recent builds, which was the rusted-out Bimmer that’s been posted all over the web. I guess his garage or something caught on fire and he’s been rebuilding that car, but he recently picked up this silver 2800CS coupe…
Every time I tried to get a good shot of it he was driving away so here’s a shot of him driving away…
S2000 on classic Work Equips…
Jordan McCord putting his hood back on as the day was coming to a close…
Thus ends the first day of Import Alliance 2011…can you believe we’re already at part 6 and it’s barely the close of the first day? Haha…there’s more to come but definitely not as many photos as day one. The second day was a smaller event so there weren’t as many cars and a lot of them were the same from the first day. There’s still a couple parts left but not as vast as the previous. So anyway, after the event came to a close, we hopped into our friend Arthur’s CR-V and headed back to the hotel. There we took a break, showered, and regrouped for the rest of the night. DPK David and I were at the other hotel down the way, but we changed and what not and walked back over to the La Quinta to see what was going down…
…and the party began…
This was what the La Quinta parking lot looked like when we got there. The whole lot front, side, and back were filled with cars and people. Even the Holiday Inn or whatever lot next door was filled with people. Guys and gals were drinking, hanging out by the pool, etc…You can see how close people were to the cars. To the left of this photo you can see Jay’s S2000…
For the most part everything was pretty chill. The Nashville Police cruised up just to see that everything was cool and it was… but it got crazier later on in the night…The further the night progressed, more drinking occurred, and more drunk ass people were walking around in the parking lot. At one point some drunken fool got right up in DPK David’s face all belligerent and said “Hey you got a cigarette or am I gonna have to slap a bitch?!” All crazy and shit. I mean, it doesn’t really matter who you are…if someone is going to be inches away from your face shouting drunken bullshit at you, the first reaction is obviously just to crack the dude in the face and be done with it. We weren’t drinking, but it doesn’t mean it’s cool to get in someone’s face and act like a punk bitch. David, is not one of those dudes that just lets things slide. In fact, when he gets angry, he’s almost down to do whatever it takes to fuck someone up…that’s just the type of guy he is. I was really close to putting the camera down and just locking down a nice rear naked choke until the dude passed out but I saw that David remained calm… We were in a different state, with younger people who were drunk, and didn’t want to ruin the “ambiance” of the La Quinta party so David got right back in the guy’s face and said “Why the fuck would I have a cigarette for you?” and then the dude gotta got the hint and backed off. DPK David said he thought that he was trying to call him a bitch at first but apparently the dude was already mad at some girl so that’s why he went off in grand fashion, too bad it was in the face of the wrong guy and it almost got him a good stomping. This is the same guy later on, that thought it was a funny idea to dance in front of a police car when the police were trying to get through the lot and then ran away like a little bitch when the cop got out of his patrol car….
At one point, the hotel management told the police to shut it down and so the police attempted to do so…Before that however, there was racing on the freeway on ramp next to the parking lot and everyone was drinking and watching….even the police. DPK David walked over to the officer and asked what he thought of all the racing that was going on and the police told us that he loves drag racing so he didn’t have a problem with it… Go ahead and re-read that last sentence, I’ll wait…
Okay, he said that he was cool with people racing on the highway. This was when the Civic coupe was running down a street bike. The officer was even telling us that he knew the street bike was going to lose. David then told him that if this was going on out in Cali, people would be getting shot at by the police and shit would get shut down immediately. Realistically, you can barely even drive a lowered car out here and not get fucked with by the police, let alone drinking in public and racing on the freeway…or even beating off in the parking lot…shit is definitely different out there… The cop was just like “we’re the nicer folks” (compared to the cops out west) and that they are more chill and just let things slide unless hotel management says something to them, since it was there property. I can dig it though, I don’t know how much shit the cops have to deal with on a everyday basis but that part of Nashville seems so quiet without IA being there that they probably don’t have much shit to do normally. I mean, during rush hour traffic there was a total of like 6 cars on the highway, the other cars were people arriving from whatever state they were coming from for Import Alliance. It’s just slow there so I don’t blame the cops for enjoying some illegal street racing and letting kids drink publicly and make asses of themselves…
Eventually when more Nashville PD showed up, people retreated to their rooms. It took awhile for that to happen though because kids were busy trying to put stickers on the police cars as they drove by, dance and act like assholes in front of the police, and do that stupid fucking planking thing everywhere. One dude even got arrested for trying to plank on top of a police car. I’m pretty happy that these kids weren’t on psychedelics or cocaine and shit cuz who knows what they would be doing if they were on some mind-altering shit…haha. We actually listened though and went back up to Rywire Ryan’s room to watch the mayhem ensue from above…
This is a shot from the balcony before the police started rolling up from each side. This shot is kind of deceiving because you don’t see the rest of the people that are spread out throughout the rest of the parking lot…
Ryan looking shocked as people raced back and forth on the highway. There was actually a race happening on the highway at one point, and on the other side of the highway, there was a police car pulling over some random person for speeding…how ironic…The officer that we spoke too even admitted that they love pulling people over for just having a taillight out or something stupid and minor like that. Apparently it’s okay if you want to race people on the freeway and drive like a fucking maniac….as long as all your taillights are functioning…
Here’s a shot from above when one of the police cars started circling the lot and had the lights on, in an effort to get people to go to their hotel rooms. It’s funny to see that when the police shows up, a bigger crowd forms…that’s some shit that you will never see here because police would have riot gear on and would be busy firing rubber bullets at people…haha…
One a majority of the people went back inside, that’s when the mayhem inside the hotel started. The majority of the people went to their rooms to hang out on the balconies. There they heckled people and hurled GLASS beer bottles at people that remained in the parking lot. One of the bottles even went as far as to hit one of the 350Zs in the lot. If you cherish your car, don’t ever bring it to the La Quinta because there is a highly possible chance that some shit will fly at it… Not really sure how people came up with the notion that it was cool to throw glass bottles at people, 3-4 stories up, but at these La Quinta parties, anything goes. Some guy actually tried to be a tough guy and was taunting others into throwing bottles at him so that he could go kick their ass. That proved to be a stupid ass idea of course, and the guy left his cell phone on the ground as he tough guy-walked his way upstairs looking for someone. We were just in the balcony staring at the dudes cell phone sitting on the parking lot floor before one of the PG+K guys ran down there to grab it…
The shit that was going on was just absurd. People than ran around in the hotel damaging hotel property, taking fire extinguishers and spraying them, etc. I looked at the ice machine on the floor where Ryan and Big Mike were staying and that shit was fucked up. Then people started setting off their car alarms randomly because they thought it was cool…
Here are Arthur, Chris, DPK David, Rywire, and Big Mike watching everything go down from the balcony…If pictures had sounds, you would probably hear someone banging on the door at this point. Zach “Rogue” Poland was screaming at me from another balcony to open the door for him so he could come hang out with him but he was so drunk that I just told him that he was an unpleasant drunk and we didn’t like him, and told him to go away…haha…We met up with him later on though when he told us that someone stole his beer cooler. We all actually watched this happen but we just thought the people that rolled his cooler away were his friends. I just thought it was weird how his friends looked like the limp-wristed dudes from 30 Seconds to Mars…
Over on the balcony next to us was Mexican Zac Efron aka Frankstar, aka Bolt Dudes aka Downstairs Frank. We call him “Downstairs Frank” because someone at the show really asked him why he was selling stickers that said “Downstairs” (when it actually says Downstar Inc.) on them, in which I replied “because that’s where your nuts go”….anyways, he was yelling at us from his balcony and wanted us to go over to that room because Ben Torres aka B.L.T. was just fucked up out of his mind…I really didn’t know what he had been drinking the whole night, but the fact that there was someone fucked up and passed out meant that it would make for good photos… Now to truly grasp what Ben had been doing with his free time the whole night, I had to turn to PG+K member Stephen Burke, who recently uploaded these photos of Ben…
Oh Ben, drinking Crown Royal like it was a liter of nice cold Coca Cola…
Here is Ben partying it up in the Elevator with people whom I’ve taken the liberty of protecting the identities of, just because I don’t know if Ben had did anything to them in his inebriated state…
So we know the culprit was a bottle of Crown Royal and probably like 6 30-packs of Bud Light…Now throughout my years of drinking, I’ve always known one rule to be true….“Beer before liquor, makes you sicker…Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear…” I had seen Ben walking around with a couple of beers throughout the night, so when I saw him downing a bottle of Crown, we all had a pretty good idea that he was going to be fucked…
Hi Ben. The first thing that came to mind when I walked into the bathroom was why he was sitting in a tub of water. Not even a full tub, just a little bit of water, like enough to just soak the backside of his body, making it easier for someone to take his kidneys out and sell them on the black market. His friends told me that they wanted to cool him down…I don’t know how laying him in a little bit of water was going to really cool him down, but I stopped asking questions…The other thing you should be asking yourself, is are those Durex condoms photoshopped into the photo, or are they actually there? Haha…
Frank was in the bathroom and was all smiles, so I asked him how many times he planned on having sex with Ben and that above, was his response. I reminded him that sodomy with a passed out male was still date rape and highly illegal…but Frank replied with “Come on homie, they’re street racing and drinking outside like everything is fair game…Bankhead shawty CAW CAW!!”….He’s from Cali so why he always reps Bankhead and makes bird sounds, I’ll never know…. He then wanted to know if I wanted to photograph the events that followed and then I threw up in the tub where Ben laid, and then I ran for my life…I found the officer that we watched the races with downstairs and told him what was about to happen in the bathroom of room 267, and he said “I got next”….
Good thing they got condoms to protect themselves…
All in all, the whole night was pretty fucking ridiculous. In Nashville, from pure observation…you’re allowed to street race, drink in public, violate private hotel property, and hurl glass bottles at unsuspecting people…oh but you can’t plank on top of a police car because that is wrong. The parties remained inside until the police left and then someone thought it was a good idea to pull the fire alarm inside the hotel, which called for an evacuation, that then allowed everyone to once again drink and party in the parking lot of the La Quinta. Was it a cool experience? Ehhh…Would I do it again? Probably not…I think next time I’d rather just prefer to have a quiet night and go explore downtown Nashville or something. As exciting as it is to hear that someone got impaled by a bottle of Corona, it’s not worth losing sleep over and putting yourself in danger just to have “a blast”…
We didn’t really want to deal with all the bullshit that was going on at the hotel anymore so we just headed over to the Waffle House down the street to kill some time before we called it a night…
When we got to the Waffle House, we were greet with trail of puke that was trickling down the sloped parking lot and that was definitely the first thing we wanted to see before we ate…I ordered the biscuits with country gravy because that is certainly the thing that resembled vomit the least…that is called sarcasm…but yes, I did eat that and it was fucking delicious…
The people that worked there were super generous and asked us about Import Alliance and what it was all about. I told him that there was a guy named Ben Torres in the hotel getting sodomized by a guy that sells nuts and he smiled…Then he went on to talk about how great his Corolla FX16 was for what seemed like 4 hours before we finally managed to escape and go back to the rooms to get some rest…
That will draw a close to today’s coverage. Hope you enjoyed it…Everything I said was factual about the parties at La Quinta, except for the raping of B.L.T. I don’t really know what happened because I left. It could have totally happened though. If a man can jack off publicly in a parking lot thinking that it was entertainment for the masses, anything is possible at the La Quinta IA parties…
Back with more tomorrow…haha…thanks for looking….
Import Alliance 2011 Coverage…Part 3…
I’d like to offer a welcome to the many new viewers that have traveled over to these parts since the Import Alliance 2011 coverage started. One of the key reasons for me going out there was to show support for the import automotive community outside of the west coast. I’ve always kept up with the builds out there and though my content has always been predominantly of Hondas out here, I definitely have my eyes on other builds from the rest of the country and other parts of the world. Today marks part 3 of the coverage and it’s going to be more image-heavy so I’ll keep the introduction to a minimal. In part 1, I told you all about how the flight was and what traveling to Nashville was like for me. Part 2 I discussed the food and the people down south, and today I’m gonna give a quick word on the builds themselves and the cars as a whole out east/midwest/south…
I took a shit ton of photos…bordering at right around 700 photos. I’m still going through a bulk of them but you will notice that I took a lot of shots of the cars I liked at the event. There are a bunch of shots of certain cars from different angles because I didn’t want you guys to just see one photo of a particular build out there and just move on. By showing you guys different angles of the cars, you get a better idea of what the car is actually like. I also took a bunch of photos because I also went out there for work. In the print world, we try not to use repeat shots so if I run the photo on The Chronicles, you definitely won’t see them again in the magazines when they go to print. I figured it was better to take a ton of photos that end up not getting used than for me to not take enough and wished that I did. It’s one of the rare times I leave California to cover an event the size of Import Alliance so I went in with no regrets. I think I got a good sense of what the builds are like so if this trip ended up being the only time I ever went out there, I made it worthwhile, you know?
When it comes to coverage like this, you will and should only see the best builds that the event has to offer. There are guys who go to the events and just take photos of every every car in sight but then you as a reader have an incredibly hard time focusing on the good cars because you’re just filtering through the ones you don’t want to see. With an event like Import Alliance, it’s absolutely impossible to take a photo of every car because there are so many cars out there. There are areas of the event that I didn’t cover because I just didn’t get a chance to get to it. The cars you see here are what I feel represent IA the best because I feel these are some of the best builds that that portion of the country has to offer. No matter how you want to say it, being completely diplomatic or not, you as an enthusiast has to understand that the Import Alliance event is definitely more quantity than quality. If you feel that statement is made in error, than that is your opinion. There are many, many, MANY great builds out there, but there are also a fucking shit load of crappy ones. When you get so many people together, you’re obviously going to see some cars that aren’t favorable to your eyes. Different people like different things, it’s only natural…It’s okay to admit that there were shitty cars at Import Alliance. If you didn’t, you’re lying to yourself. For those of you who weren’t out there, let me tell you, there were some shit boxes out there…haha. I will be an asshole about it because I’ve never been one to sugarcoat anything…
The builds you see here are in my opinion, some of the best there or the most interesting. If I somehow missed your car and you don’t see it on The Chronicles, it’s probably because I just didn’t get a chance to see it. There is also a slight chance the photo came out shitty too because I’m not that great of a photographer and there were millions of burnt and over tanned people walking around in front of my shots. I may have just missed your car because you were parked on the track, where I didn’t venture out to, or I just didn’t see it at that particular moment. If you personally feel like you have a great build that I missed out on, then my bad…I just didn’t catch it. I walked about as much of the event as I could and I definitely didn’t go to certain areas. I’m just saying…if you don’t see it here, it doesn’t mean I thought your car was a shit box or it sucked, or whatever. My opinion shouldn’t really matter anyways so don’t be offended if in the following parts of the coverage, your car is absent.
The ones I did like, I went back every chance I could to get the cars at a different angle or to get a closer shot of certain details that I liked. There are still a lot of photos coming your way so please bear with me. I took about 700, say like, 50-75 of them went to publication, 100 of them went into the trash, so that still leaves like what…500 or so? We’re doing 45-50 shots a day in each portion of the coverage so you should already be able to add about how many parts are still coming….I wanted to be thorough and comprehensive…what can I say?…
Also, let’s not forget that Import Alliance is NOT a car show. It’s supposed to be a meet and gathering of enthusiasts. It’s people getting together to hang out and check out each other’s cars. Naturally, it begins to look like a show when it’s reached a level of success and you start to have vendors, and booth cars, and what not. With that, you begin to expect a certain level of build quality because it “looks” like a car show. It’s underlying goal is to have a place where enthusiasts can gather and enjoy the company of others. As long as the people running it don’t turn it into a cash cow and try to simply make money off other enthusiasts, then it’ll continue to be successful…
Now, on with the coverage…
Clean DC2 on Regas at the Track.One booth…
Track-spec EK from Papaya Motorsports…
One of the best reasons for traveling out to a part of the country that I have never been to is seeing things I’ve never seen before. I had heard about this car before and I’ve seen an JDM Accord wagon in photos but this was the first time I’ve actually seen one in person. Definitely cool to look at it up close. I like how the front bumper and lip are different from the sedan Euro-R and how the rear end looks. I almost think the wheels hurt this car though because the aggressive sizing of the rear makes the whole wagon looked really raked. The front is pretty aggressive as it is and has a nice concave face already so it would have looked perfectly fine if it was non-staggered. Just imagine if it had a nice set of Volk CEs or TE37s on it…or maybe even a NSX-spec Regamaster EVO or something…still cool nonetheless though…
This Civic pulled up with the wagon and it also caught my eye…
The kevlar hood and front Spoon Sports lip is cool but I thought the most interesting touch was rocking four drag (Exospeeds?) wheels as regular driving wheels…Not sure how sturdy those wheels would be driving around on the streets but it’s a cool look…
S15 Silvia on Volk GT-Us from the La Quinta hotel…
TSX, Supermade S14, and Tiger’s boosted EP3 at the CCW area…
Really liked this Mugen-kitted Accord on CCWs…
Don’t know shit about street bikes but the wide ass rear tire on it was cool…Didn’t make much of a difference in terms of contact patch though from just looking at it… 
Side view of the JDM Accord wagon…
J’s Racing-themed S2000 with Chris Drnek’s EF…
I really like Chris’ EF, nice, simple, and has a timeless feel to it…I know his name because he recently added me on Facebook, otherwise he would still be “the guy with the green EF on Mugen wheels”…
Turbocharged RSX on Volk CE28s…isn’t it crazy how you almost expect every engine bay to be tucked now and feel a little strange when you see one that isn’t?…
Danny Dang’s boost single cam at the Track.One booth…
Big Mike rocking his Big Mike Eefect tee…
K-swapped EK on CCWs possibly owned by arm crossing guy in the background…
VIP-styled GS rolling through…
Another EK on CCWs…
Two-toned bays are slowly dying out here but they are still really popular out there. I really liked this boosted DC2 with the gold bay….on CCWs…
I know you’re noticing a shitload of cars on CCWs but this particular area was where the CCW booth was so there was a large group of vehicles rolling on their wheels…
The Supermade “Instant Gentleman” aero kit is probably one of the best kits every made for the S14 chassis. The lines are just so simple and elegant and not wild and bulky like many other kits made for the car…This is also on a set of CCWs…
CCWs on a meaty tire…
Slammed Prelude on either Fittipaldi or Borbet wheels (I think…)…
Seen It! stickers were everywhere at IA…
Another stanced-out Prelude, this one on Zauber wheels running a really aggressive stretch in the rear…Tucked, sparkly gray engine bay is a nice touch…
White on white boosted S2000…I have a couple other shots of this car that will come later…
If a Champ White EK9 had a liver, this is what it would look like if it had Jaundice….haha…Yellow errrr-thang…If you don’t know what “Jaundice” is, you should probably look it up, especially if you were at the La Quinta drinking 85 Bud Lights in one hour…
I love CTRs, I just don’t know how I feel about the yellow Rega EVOs….I’m a man of contrast so I like offsetting colors. The whole yellow on yellow look is definitely different, but I’m still uncertain about the look…
Orange J’s Racing-equipped S2000…
Yes, fuck…it’s Dut’s old CTR…somebody was bound to ask. The owner probably hates this car because all people ever do is ask if it was Dut’s car and there wasn’t even anything done to the car that made it as noteworthy as it was when he had it…
Harlequin VW Golf…
A couple more quick shots of Joe’s Civic coupe…I have other shots of it coming later but at this point in time, there were all kinds of people swarming the car so I couldn’t get a good shot of the whole thing…
First time I’ve ever seen a three-toned Honda…The owner went a little over the top trying to match the Takata green and red of the Bride seats…I feel like it takes away from the entire build itself because you’re so distracted by all the colors. He’s got some good mods on there too but it’s hard to focus on them…
That’s all for today. Hope you guys enjoyed the photos. Back with more tomorrow and I promise, less CCW…I know it really seems like every car had them but it was just that particular section because of the CCW booth…still love the wheels though. Anyways, stay tuned…
Import Alliance 2011 Coverage…Part 2…
Hmm….let’s see what should we discuss today about the trip…Ah, yes… I got it. I was eating lunch earlier and something came to mind that I thought I should touch on. Today, we’re going to talk about two very interesting topics from the Nashville IA trip; The culture and the food…
Culture Clash…Now I have done quite a bit of traveling in my lifetime, don’t be mistaken but traveling to Nashville, Tennessee was a completely different experience. Thanks to my parents, I’ve been able to see Hong Kong, Japan, China, and many parts of the United States. I’ve been to the tri-state area as well and even Canada, but Southern folks are very interesting people. Los Angeles and Cali in general is a pretty diverse state with many different ethnic groups and cultures, but we still have that general California/West Coast attitude. When I got to Nashville, I was really surprised by how nice people were and got a sense of what true “southern hospitality” really is. This isn’t really from talking to the enthusiasts of course, because they came from all over the central and east coast. I’m talking more about the people that were actually from the south. The people that worked at the Waffle House I went to and other restaurants were really nice, talkative people. I guess it’s because things are a lot slower out there and people aren’t always in a rush to do something or get somewhere that they actually take the time to be human. Over here, everyone almost seems as if they are always in a constant state of panic because there is so much going on. In the south, people are more patient and willing to just talk to you and give them a sense of what they’re like. Even the police out there are unbelievably nice (I’ll discuss this more later on) and let people get away with practically anything. I can’t even think of one person I spoke to out there that gave me a hard time. The manager of the La Quinta hotel that everyone was literally tearing apart was still very kind despite watching her property being destroyed at the hands of drunken morons. I’m just saying, it’s just different out there…
The southern accent is also something that was very interesting to me. Everybody talks that way out there so it didn’t seem unusual to them at all but for DPK David, Big Mike, Ryan, and I, it was a crazy to hear everyone speak that distinctly. It was really easy to pick up though and like I was telling David, if I somehow stayed here two days longer, I swear, I would start speaking with a southern accent too because it stays in your mind. It still trips me out sometimes how guys like Jay and Bon from PGK have a southern accent because we never hear asian dudes out here with accents like that.
All in all, the people were a great experience for me personally. Everybody was willing to give us a ride whenever we needed one, which was great because we saved some money from not having to rent a car, and all the people we encountered while there treated us like we belonged there. Well, except for one guy who was drunk and got in DPK David’s face and almost got his life unearthed from his body but again, I’ll talk about that later…haha…
Fine Dining…The food is definitely something I should touch on. They fucking love sugar, goddamn. I thought people out here for crazy about putting sugar in there shit but people in the south love their sugar. Everything I drank tasted like I was drinking a bag of sugar, and trust me, I love ice teas, and what not that are flavorful. The asian food is really good out there too surprisingly. I never imagined that I would go to Nashville and eat Asian food but some of the spots we went to were so good that I ended up going back. With that said however, I really wanted to speak on the food out there because people FUCKING LOVE JACK IN THE BOX. Holy shit, it was one of the most random fucking things ever. When I got to the hotel after Jay picked me up from the airport, I was hanging out in the parking lot with them by the pool and saw a couple empty Jack in the Box wrappers and boxes, etc. I didn’t think anything of it other than the fact that I found it interesting that they even had a Jack in the Box out there. I still remember the days when Jack in the Box was exclusive only to California and parts of the west coast. Anyways, after Big Mike arrived, he was hungry and was asking some of the people there about what was good in the area. PGK Jay’s cousin was like….”Well Waffle House is pretty good but you guys gotta try this one spot…it’s called ‘Jack in the Box’…” Big Mike and I looked at each other with a non-vocal “what the fuck?” We didn’t say anything after that and just went to Waffle House but while we were there, I brought it up and he too thought that it was strange. After we finished eating, we went back to the hotel again to hang out and some people asked what we ate and we told them that we ate at Waffle House. These guys were like…”Oh yeah, that place is good….but have you tried JACK IN THE BOX?” Ahhhhhh….mind fuck….haha. When David and Ryan arrived, they were sort of hungry and asked what there was to eat and at that point, I explained to them the fascination with Jack in the Box out there and they didn’t believe me.
The next day while we were at the event, DPK David, Big Mike, and I were helping Ryan set up the Rywire booth that was apart of Loi from Sportcar Motion’s Skunk2 booth. One of the guys from Function Garage, Brian, walked over to the Skunk2 booth and asked Loi if he wanted to do dinner after the event. He was like…”Hey, you wanna do dinner tonight?” Loi said he was down and then Brian was like “I gotta take you to this one spot, it’s called….JACK IN THE BOX.” And the dude was like super excited about it…It was one of the craziest things I witnessed while I was there. Loi had no idea so he kinda just looked at him and smiled and then turned over to our direction and we kinda laughed. Shit is wild man, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I fucking love Jack in the Box, but I’ve had it all my life and it’s like a typical fast food spot for me. It’s a preferred spot for sure, but they talk about it like it’s gourmet dining…seriously, I can’t even make that shit up. We had other moments out there where people came and asked us if we had tried Jack in the Box as well. I almost wanted to go to the Jack in the Box out there to see if there was anything different from the one we have out here. Do they serve you two 99 cent tacos and an Ultimate Cheeseburger on a plate or something? I literally got one like a mile from my apartment…shit ain’t that fancy, haha. I guess it’s like a new hot spot out there for them and it’s just one of those things that shows you just how different the culture is out in middle America…
Another thing I noticed is how much people love to drink beer out there. Holy fuck, everyone was walking around with a Bud Light 30-pack like it was attached to them at the hip. I’ve done my fair share of partying when I was younger but my friends and I never consumed this much beer. We were always more into drinking hard liquor because it got the job done quicker… I think Import Alliance is the sole reason why Budweiser is still in business down south cuz people drink that shit like it’s water…. I thought when I heard stories of all the crazy partying at the La Quinta it was because people were on some hardcore psychedelics like mushrooms or something or pounding down bricks of cocaine but it’s all the product of Bud Light consumption…haha. While drugs would have made the night much more interesting and outright dangerous, I’m glad to see that these guys are drinking only beer and not partying like they were at a club in Hollywood…
Okay, on with the coverage. When we last left off, we had just finished eating at the Waffle House and headed back to the hotel to hang out while we waited for DPK David and Rywire to arrive. Jay’s cousins had dropped us off and went back to hanging out with some of the other folks there and Big Mike and I were just walking around and looking at the cars that were there. It was already hot but we got tired of standing in the sun so we headed up to PGK Jay and Franks hotel room to hang out. Jay was at the car wash with some of the other PGK guys but we had the room key so we could put our bags up there. A fully air-conditioned room sounded amazing so we just hung out in the room and looked out of the balcony while people continued to trickle into the La Quinta lot…
This couple that Jay knew came up to the room as well and brought some ice cold Bud Lights. Big Mike and them hung out on the patio but it was hot as fuck so I stayed inside where the A/C was and pretended to be a part of their conversation…
Eventually I sucked it up though and stood on the balcony and got some shots of some cars…this is that widebody S14 that I posted in part 1. You can really tell how much wider it is than stock with this overhead shot…I really liked this S14. I was going to hit up the owner to see if he would have been down for me to shoot it possibly for a future story in Super Street but I later found out that he was in the latest issue of S3 magazine…oh well…
A couple of PG+K vehicles…The STi belongs to Stephen and the blue RHD Integra belongs to Be and this was actually the car that Jay showed up at the airport with to pick my ass up…Seeing this car reminds me of bad the roads are in Nashville. Be’s got a pretty stiff suspension and there was a point when Jay hit this bump so hard that I almost flew out of the car…
The dude on the far left is Zach “RogueEG6″ Poland. This dude talks so much and is so loud, that I swear I can still hear his voice in my head…haha…Seriously though, he does talk a lot. Nice guy though…
A couple minutes later, Ryan and DPK David show up with Arthur and Chris, who are friends of Ryan’s from Canada…Throwing down the beer in this photo is Stephen from PG+K…
We hung out for a little bit and got Ryan and the rest of the group caught up on everything that we had done since we got there. We then headed out to the balcony and saw that the “Civette” showed up. If you guys are unfamiliar with the build, it’s a Civic shell that’s been mated to a Corvette chassis. We went down stairs to take a closer look at it and here’s a shot of the engine bay. The rest of it is outright hideous so I didn’t get a shot of the whole car…
The others were hungry since getting in from their flight so they took off to go eat at the Waffle House while Big Mike and I stayed behind to walk around.The weather was starting to cool down a bit so it wasn’t totally unbearable…
Another shot of Nick Weir’s K-swapped VW truck…
Here’s another shot of the silver track-prepped EK who belongs to Justin or username; “wEaK Squad” from the NWP4Life forums…I’m showing you this shot because I wanted to show you…
…his massive rear shock tower bar…shit is beefy-looking…
I saw this S2000 a couple days before I left for Nashville on the web so it was cool to actually get a closer look at it in person…
The rear fender treatment isn’t for everyone but it’s wild in person. The bodywork looks pretty good too and makes the rear of this S2 extremely aggressive…It’s so wide though that I think it almost throws off the front end of the car. It’s definitely different though….
Color-matched Cusco cage is a nice touch…
Rear quarter shot of Jay’s S2000…
Seen It! S2000…
Matte Red Volkswagon GTI…
Big Mike discussing engine bay ideas with the guys from Grade A Garage…Zach Poland taking a beer nap in the background…
Joe Maguschak’s engine bay…Had to be one of the cleanest, best assembled engine bays of the Import Alliance event…more on that later…
DPK David talking to Matt aka “Bad 350Z”. Matt is the one that did the bulk of the work on the engine bay above…
Jay’s S2000 was pretty dirty but he’s a track guy now so it’s okay to be filthy. Just ask his dirty mustache that he grew out for the weekend…
Honda Fit on some CCWs…
As soon as DPK David and the rest of the guys came back from eating, David and I grabbed our luggage and went to our hotel to check-in. We had heard all the crazy stories about the parties at La Quinta so I wasn’t about to try to sleep over there. In hindsight that turned out to be an amazing idea because it got pretty bad over at the La Quinta pretty quickly. Our hotel was walking distance to the La Quinta so we had the best of both worlds. We got to hang out at the parking lot party and also got to sleep peacefully after…Name the wheel in the above pic and you win absolutely nothing…
The first night of partying wasn’t so bad. There was some debauchery that went about but for the most part it was pretty chill. Just people drinking beers in the lot and talking…
The Nashville Police were present the whole time but were only there to keep an eye on things and get cars to move if they were blocking the flow of the parking lot. They just drove around and hung out with people there….
A couple hours went by and the cops were asked by hotel management to shut down the party outside early so people retreated to their rooms. I didn’t really take very many photos at this time because it was pretty dark in the lot. The last couple hours consisted mostly of people drinking beers and staring at cars and shit. It was pretty uneventful. At around 10:30pm, we decided to head out to downtown Nashville to grab some dinner…
The Hard Rock sounded good and was one of the first spots we saw so we made it our dinner spot…
It was kinda late in the evening already so the restaurant was pretty dead. We ate, talked, and then went back to the hotel to get some rest. We only had a couple hours to sleep so we made the most of the 3-4 hours that we got…
I guess the parties continued on while we were resting, including some dude who apparently was just jacking off in the parking lot or something in front of everyone. Whatever the case, I’m glad I wasn’t a witness to any public male masturbation…fucking weirdos…
The next day, we got up at 5:30am, got ready, ate some breakfast, and set off to Nashville Super Speedway for the first day of Import Alliance 2011. The lines rolling in were massive but we had vendor passes so we just drove right in and parked…
Right when we parked, I looked outside and spotted Bon B’s Civic, which I haven’t seen in over 3 years. I still remember the first time I met Bon when his Civic was still blue. He had driven out to Eibach and blown his motor then and I met him at Do It Dyno. Crazy to see how far the car has come and how it’s now finally close to completion…
He’s now K-swapped and his entire car has been repainted a Porsche GT3 green…
Looking good so far but Bon was the first one to admit that he still had a lot to do before it was finished. The engine bay that connects through the firewall still needs to be completed and his intake manifold has been left untouched because he soon plans to acquire a set of Kinsler individual throttle bodies…
One of Bon’s axles was binding as he was driving, which resulted in the C/V boot ripping and grease spraying all over the bay. Here he is attempting to wipe it down before the gates opened…
Tim Shultz from Hybrid Racing chatting it up in front of Bon’s Civic…
I found out from a Chronicles reader that this yellow CTR belongs to Matt Tucker. Here he is wiping his EK9 down…
I wanted to give you guys a glimpse of what was behing the vents in the rear bumper but I suck at that…
Really liked this Nissan 370Z from Import alliance…The Wedsport SA55M with the matching color inserts and the overall stance of the vehicle is just a great look…
Walker Japan…
Matt Tucker’s K-swapped CTR engine bay…
Not really sure why this happened or what purpose it serves…
The engine bay of Nick Weir’s K-swapped VW truck…
Big Mike chatting it up with Shocker Joe Coville…
Gonna close it out today with one of the best IS300 builds I’ve ever seen. I still think my boy Billy Shea’s HKS-themed IS300 is the best of all time but this one is right up there with him cuz this shit is the business…I remember seeing photos of it floating around on the net from various events in the past but it’s crazy to see it in person….
Lots of custom bodywork on the outside and you can already tell from the cut-out on the hood that this turbo is pretty massive…
Right-hand drive Toyota Altezza conversion…Vertex floormats, Bride seats, custom center console, color-matched trim, etc…shit is sick…everything that you would want an an award-winning show car…
Shaved and tucked engine bay with a 2JZ-GTE swap…
Big Mike talked to him and I believe this IS made around 1048whp….
That’s all for today…thanks everyone for looking and I hope you guys come back for more…
