About five years ago, I was sitting inside of the waiting area at an iHOP in Washington, waiting for my to-go order to come out of the kitchen. It’s odd to order takeout at an iHOP, but I have this weird thing about not wanting to eat by myself in public places (unless absolutely necessary) so I thought it would be more comforting to just eat it in my hotel room. This was somewhere in SeaTac, which is one of the shittier parts of town so it was probably safer for me to climb back into my solitude and enjoy this Country Fried Steak dinner in my room, which, not coincidentally enough, was just mere steps away from the hotel. I didn’t know the area very well and didn’t seek any recommendations, nor did I plan to hang out with anyone but myself, so I chose to stay near the airport. That way I could do my job, get in and out of the state and go home as soon as possible…

2013 was a big year for me. Just a few months before that, I had finally set foot into Japan for the very first time and it really opened my eyes to many possibilities. That trip changed my life in so many ways. By then, The Chronicles was doing pretty well but it wasn’t something that was financially feasible for me to live off of so I was still doing lots of magazine work. Print was doing okay then. Honda Tuning was still around, as was Import Tuner, and Super Street was still being run by Jonathan “JDM” Wong. Things were good. I think The Chronicles was “popular”, by whatever definition you want to use to associate it with it being “well known” to the public but there was just so much more I wanted to do. I think going to Japan created expectations for me that I never had before while I was doing this whole thing. It was just for fun, you know? I would just capture what I saw and people could either like it or not. It was just for me. Coming home from Japan made me realize that it was important for me to travel as much as I could. People enjoyed seeing life through my eyes but it was important for me because I was beginning to fully understand that the things I saw were…well…important TO ME. I just never really cared too much about anything before and at that point in my life I hadn’t really taken on the responsibility of being the eyes and ears for so many in the automotive community…

I was in Washington a few months later because I decided that if I really wanted to make a push being a freelance automotive journalist, I had to go seek things out on my own, instead of waiting on my bosses to send me work. I needed to be a go-getter. California by that time had been so saturated with established and up-and-coming photographers that it was pretty difficult to get consistent work at home. Not only that, but every location you can possibly think of had been used in photoshoots ten times over so I wasn’t even excited about shooting in Los Angeles or any of the surrounding cities. Shit was played-out. Run dry. Boring. I knew that if I wanted to get work and to continue to evolve my craft, I would have to leave the state. I had to step out of my comfort zone and really find cars that others wouldn’t normally have access to…

So I went to Seattle, Washington.

This was once a great hub for the automotive tuning community a decade before I went up there. The car scene was thriving and so many great Hondas were being put together out there by the guys from Trikspeed and others. There was also a car from Canada that I wanted to shoot and I was able to convince the guy to make the 2-hour drive down to Seattle so I could shoot it.

You know Reggie Mah from Nightrunner/NRI? Owner of one of the most successful tuning lifestyle brands in Canada currently?

Reggie showed-up in his Integra so I could put it on the cover of Super Street magazine with only one microfiber towel and a bottle of Dasani water to clean his car. BOTTLED DRINKING WATER. And his trunk was flooded from driving down in the rain…

How far we’ve come… Seriously. I laugh thinking about it now but holy shit, none of us really knew what we were doing back then…

Anyways, back to iHOP… I remember sitting there, waiting for my order to come out, staring outside at the overcast sky. There was some drizzle, as always, because it’s the Pacific Northwest.

It was at that moment that I realized that I would be successful…this was going to be something. The world would know my work…

It was also then when I realized that the successful road would be a very lonely one. I had to go do this by myself. The creative process would be very solitary… and that was okay. Because what I was doing would mean something to so many others, and maybe from a distance, it wouldn’t seem that lonely. It just meant that there would be times when I would have to go about things alone but it would be worth it…

I retreated to my hotel room, sat by a tiny television, turned-up the volume to drown-out the moans next door, and cut my country-fried steak with a plastic knife. Up until that moment I opened my mouth to place that order, I hadn’t uttered a word to anyone else the entire day…

A man gets a lot of time to think during the silence…

If you’re wondering why you’re reading all of this, bear with me because it is important. I want you to understand the significance of this region to me and how it lead to all of the content flow you’ve been seeing in the last few days from the Wekfest Seattle event captured by so many others…

The following morning, I woke-up bright and early to go scout locations for the shoots I had planned. It was a brutally cold morning in like, March or something, I don’t remember the exact time. Just know that it was the Pacific Northwest where it rains like ten months out of the year. I had to use my driver’s license to scrape off the ice from the windshield of my rental car just so I could see. I found a couple of spots in the area and even drove by this place called Alki Beach, Seattle and its surrounding areas are beautiful. It really is. I hit up a couple of car guys local to the area to see if they wanted to hang out and shoot as well. I had nothing but time there so why not see as much car shit as I could, right? I think at that point I had met a couple of the Trikspeed guys once or twice when they visited California. Terry even brought his Integra down the year before so it could be one of the main attractions for my “GENERATIONS” display at the 2012 Nisei Showoff event. It meant a lot to me that he and his friends were making the trek down and I really appreciated their efforts. Since I was in their neck of the woods, I wanted to hang out with them and possibly see some more of their cars. I had only seen these cars in photos from a long, long time ago so it would be interesting to see if these cars looked as good as they did in photos and in print. 8 out of 10 times, that’s never the case so I didn’t have the highest of expectations but knowing the type of tastes that they had, and after seeing Terry’s car, I knew I’d be pleasantly surprised no matter what…

That trip, I got to see Steve Kwan’s (‘dagreenek’ for the old guys who know that name) Civic, Rainier “Toto” Deleon’s Civic, and a few others. I shot Steve and Toto’s Civics that day just for the hell of it, and they both ended up in Super Street magazine later that year. These cars were incredible. Every bit as good as the photos, even better because I finally got to see them in detail, and more importantly, the people behind the cars were great. The older I get, the more importance I place on the people behind the builds and these were the types of people that I wanted to be around. The night before had seemed so solitary but the following day I think I had made some friends who shared a mutual interest in cars and other things. There was something about this region that I knew was special and unique to itself…

Before I left that weekend, I told the guys that I’d be back and I’d bring some friends with me next time to show them what this area was all about…

I’ve been back every single year since then.

Sometimes to visit, sometimes for work, but more so just to hang out with the guys up there. I even hosted a few meets up there and met many more great people…

At Wekfest Seattle this year, I was walking around the show and filming when someone stopped me. I don’t recall the name right now but this individual just wanted to stop me to thank me for breathing life back into the car community in this region and for “putting them on the map”.

I’ll tell you this wholeheartedly, I didn’t put anything on the map. This area has always had great car culture. Will it better now? I truly believe so. But it wasn’t anything more than me opening a door that was already cracked-open. I think it just needed that push. And that proverbial door wasn’t just a door, it was a fucking flood gate. And it’s WIDE open now.

I look at it as me paying back the people who were so good to me in the last few years that I’ve been up there. Guys like Terry, like Toto, and the rest, they were doing INCREDIBLE things with cars long before I set foot there. Their influence is so strong that they probably don’t even have any idea how important they are to the car community because they live so ordinarily. They just did what they thought was cool and it translated into trends that have held strong years and years after their cars were completed. That’s TRUE influence. These guys were running parts from companies that are barely making a foot print in the U.S. now, and they had these parts on their cars a decade before that. The car community in the PNW exists in this bubble where they just do awesome things that nobody else realizes because they just never bothered to look. I think people everywhere else are starting to realize that…

You want to know how strongly I believe in this place? A few months after I came back home from my trip to Seattle in 2013, I was literally in a meeting with Ken Miyoshi from the famed Import Showoff series and he was thinking about starting a nationwide tour again. Wekfest as a brand was well on its way to being recognized as one of the best in the industry so he wanted to talk to me about possibly doing a tour with cities that didn’t directly compete with the Wekfest tour. I immediately told him that Seattle was the first place he should hit. No hesitation. The rest of the country needs to see what is going on up there. It was an untapped market. All those other little Stance shows or whatever the fuck was happening up there didn’t mean shit. Those are what we call “pocket shows”. Once you take them out of their pocket, nobody knows about them, they will never make an impact. They only exist because they WANT TO PUT MONEY IN THEIR OWN POCKETS.

A Pocket Show.

Remember that. There are many.

We’re building culture here. Not parasitically sucking the life out of it to make a buck.

The Import Showoff endeavor never came to be. I don’t know exactly why, but I assume reincarnating a car show series that saw its height of success in the 90s and early 2000s would be difficult in these times. Things are very different. The industry has changed so much and business and marketing are all driven by other resources. It just never happened. Every year after 2013 I made a very concentrated effort on bringing a new set of eyes to what that region has to offer. I would go shoot cars there for magazines and for my site, I would showcase the foods we were eating there, show the people, and I would bring my friends up there to experience it with me. The entire time that was going on, I was behind the scenes with the other Ken, Kenneth Li from Wekfest, and pushing him to move the tour up to Seattle. Granted, I did nothing logistically to make this happen… Ken deserves all the credit for doing that because he is a machine and just makes things happen. He is the business-side of making this show work. I merely provided the inspiration. Sometimes that’s all you need…

The first Wekfest Seattle event happened in 2017 and it was an overwhelming success. It made people excited to be car enthusiasts up there again. It gave people a reason to bring their cars out and to expand on their community.

The first Wekfest Seattle event was also very much a feeling-out process because people didn’t know what to expect. Once they experienced the show for themselves, they wanted to come back again the following year with a car they didn’t bring, perhaps a car they hadn’t finished yet, and they also wanted to represent the Pacific Northwest proudly because they knew that there were a new set of eyes on them now.

The second Wekfest Seattle event was even better. Like my first trip to Japan, after coming back home, I developed a sense of expectation. The first event created a new standard for what people wanted to see and they wanted to expand on it, make it better, because there were expectations now. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen such a huge gap from the first show to the second. Every other tour stop we have seen in the Wekfest series has seen gradual growth, but it has needed time to develop. The shows in Seattle have been a powder keg that has exploded. Floods of people came from Canada this year to participate, many cars that didn’t come out from this region before were at this year’s show, and others who had lost motivation to finish their projects are now back in their garages wrenching. That’s amazing.

And it’ll continue to grow…

More surprising than anything were the people coming in from out of state to see the show for themselves. I saw people there who I wouldn’t see unless I was traveling to their home states to visit, some as far as Japan and Hawaii. It’s become a destination event like San Jose and Los Angeles now where people are planning their vacations around visiting this show…

This is year two.

Our efforts haven’t gone unnoticed and you have no possibly understanding of just how grateful I am to see all this come to fruition.

Let’s get to some photos finally, shall we?…

Our morning started at around 530 AM. We had to be at the CenturyLink Field venue to set-up for the show and the staff had to measure out all the car spaces and vendor booths. Seattle is one of the few stops on the tour where I will set-up my own booth because I wanted to showcase a specific car. Last year I had my boy Terry’s Integra as well as Franklin Woo’s EK Civic hatchback. This year, I hosted a very special build…

I met Wayne Denman last year at the first Seattle Wekfest show. We had chatted previously on Instagram but I never actually met the guy until that day. Wayne is an OG, I guess you can say, of the car community down in Hawaii. He and his friends put together some pretty epic Honda builds in the early 2000s. Their cars were the ones being studied and appreciated by the guys out in the West Coast and everywhere else. They had their own specific style, utilizing inspiration from Japan and their own Aloha spirit, and the cars they produced are still being posted on websites and social media outlets today. I don’t even think people realize how old those builds are. That’s how you know they were really special. Wayne had a CR-X that many of you will recall that hosted a huge JUN Auto banner on its carbon fiber hood as well as a massive intercooler crammed behind a cut-up Wings West front bumper. It was also Mocha-colored which wasn’t very subtle for that time. The car stood-out and it was one of the more popular builds from Hawaii, along with an orange Integra owned by his then-girlfriend Gerilyn. You can actually read everything you need to know about Wayne and what August Cascade is here on THE EPILOGUES, when I had a chance to pick his brain after I met him last year. But for coverage’s sake, let’s just say that he wrecked that CR-X because he was young and dumb at the time, rebuilt it using another shell, then sold the car to a friend and somehow moved to Oregon of all places within the past decade. During the last few years in Oregon, Wayne developed that itch again after devoting his life to some significant adulting, and found himself wanting to reincarnate the car that was probably his favorite parts of his youth…

I was working and judging cars last year at the first Wekfest Seattle event when my boy David comes up to me and says that there is an old white dude looking for me. In my lifetime I haven’t had very many white guys look for me specifically so I knew this was a pivotal moment in the narrative that is Wekfest Seattle. David said it was Wayne from August Cascade and I was confused because I always just assumed Wayne’s name was August Cascade. That’s a cool ass porno name or online persona in general so I was like “okay cool, I’m sure he’ll find me later.” I specifically remember his name not being August though so I was like “oh his name is Wayne, and not ‘that one guy who owned that brown CR-X from Hawaii’…” Lol. Towards the middle of the day, he actually did find me and we got to talking. He told me that his CR-X project was still pretty raw but coming to the show gave him motivation to really finish it because he wanted to bring it out for next year’s show if we were to come back…

I told him that we would for sure be coming back to Seattle in 2018 and if he did manage to finish the CR-X, we would put the car exactly where we were standing…in The Chronicles booth right in front for everyone to see. Almost a calendar year later, at 6:20 AM in the morning, Wayne, his friend from Hawaii who he had originally sold his old car to, and our friend Toto, came strolling into CenturyLink Field with a Mocha CR-X that looked damn near identical to the one I saw in photos back in 2003…just ever-so-slightly updated to match his current life’s tastes…

Vendor roll-in didn’t start until 7 AM that morning but I told Wayne to come in early so he could get situated first, and also because I really wanted to capture the car inside the completely empty convention hall. It was an important moment that needed to be shared with just us. Once the crowds came in it would be hard to talk about anything of importance, particularly with interruptions and loud music. So the small group of us just sort of stood there and appreciated the moment. We had made it happen. It couldn’t have played-out any better. Wayne completed this entire car inside his tiny ass garage in Nowhere, Oregon and now it was going to be the talk of both the Wekfest crowd and the Internet once everyone saw it. Honda guys know the ‘brown CR-X from Hawaii’. They just didn’t know it lived on in another shell 15 years later…

How amazing is that? Really. Let’s put it all into perspective…

We even got together for a group photo to commemorate the achievement. From left to right is Shaun, who is one of Wayne’s closest friends and also the guy who took over his CR-X after he moved. Wayne is center, and to the right is Rainier aka Toto, who I am really pushing to have him finish his Civic for 2019 so it can sit exactly where this CR-X sits in this photo. I’m going to try to make it a thing now where every year I host a build so important that it is worth the price of admission to see in person. Toto is one of the best car builders I’ve ever met. I hope to see him in 2019. But anyways, Shaun literally shipped the engine and everything he could from Wayne’s old CR-X back to him on a pallet to Oregon. A lot of the parts ended-up being damaged as well but Wayne made it work. Parts that you see on this shell that are from the original two CR-Xs he built in Hawaii are the engine, headlights, passenger fender, just to name a few. You can pick his brain and he’ll tell you something of significance for every piece that is bolted onto his 1988 CR-X HF, which was at one time also a drag-car shell. He even somehow managed to find a mint dashboard from some random old guy in Oregon off of Craigslist. You want to talk about builds that have significant sentimental value and and endless amount of stories to tell, look no further…

I stood up on a creaky chair by the front stage of the Wekfest event that day and was on the microphone telling people that I wanted them to enjoy the show but more importantly, to chat with people around them and to understand the stories behind the car builds at Wekfest. These are the types of stories that I think people should hear and read about. They are important…

Moving on…

Soon after our group photo, other cars began coming into the building, like this black NSX on white TEs. I really like how scenic this area is so I made my way outside to catch some of the cars rolling into the venue…

Cullen Cheung’s J’s Racing widebody S2000 running Alcon brakes, JRZ suspension and Volk Racing wheels… Excuse the sun bukkake, I was trying to be artsy…

Oh shit, so I was kinda just hanging out by the entrance that morning, minding my own business and this old Volkswagen pulls-up. It’s like super low and has this ratty, rustic-look to it, I dig it, it’s cool…

While they were waiting to get staged, thankfully before they got inside the building, the fucking thing just erupts in flames…

It looked to be a fire resulting from a fuel leak but that shit lit-up! And the guys inside the car didn’t even realize it until some of the workers who were hanging out outside starting screaming at them that their car was on fire….

Someone ran to go get a fire extinguisher and the funniest thing happened. The guy thought it was breakaway glass so he went to elbow the case that held the extinguisher and the glass didn’t even break, it just sort of pushed the glass in and then they just opened the door all casually and pulled the extinguisher out, haha. I don’t know if it translates but you had to be there to see it. They eventually put the fire out but it made for a pretty interesting morning. The lady who was working as the manager of the CenturyLink Field convention center came up to me and was like “Umm….does this happen a lot with these cars?” and I was like “With modified cars or with VWs?” Lol. I didn’t want to alarm her, present circumstances and all, and assured her that this wasn’t a common occurrence at car shows like these. Imagine if it was inside and this happened? This is CenturyLink Field where the Seattle Seahawks play and right next door is where the Mariners host their baseball games. Imagine a car show just fucking burned the whole place down?…

Luckily, all is well that ends well and the car didn’t see too much damage and they put the fire out…

I caught this photo as the guys thought that they had things under control but the car was still literally on fire before the fire extinguisher came out. Coolest mixtape cover ever if they decide to start a music career. I’m glad everything was okay though. Sucks they didn’t actually get to bring their car inside but that would have been too risky, you know? I think they were from Portland too so they had to wait for a trailer to come to pick the car up. Definitely unfortunate but it could have been way worse…

With so many Canadian neighbors making the trek, this year’s Wekfest Seattle event saw a bunch of cars you wouldn’t normally see in the USA, like JZX Mark IIs/Chasers. We hosted so many this year that they even had to have a sub category created for them so they could have their own award class…

White R33 Skyline on Work wheels… likely from Canada. Only time you’ll see automotive contraband in the streets of America is when it is quietly sneaking into a car show…

Integra Type R representing Garage Five, a tuning shop in Canada….

Steve Kwan aka “Dagreenek” now married and expecting a child, sold his Civic and drives this Lexus GX on Volk TE37 wheels. He will now henceforth be known as “DawhiteSUV”…

Henderson Nguyen, known strangely as “Potatoglasses”, in his E46 M3 project…

Midnight Purple-toned BNR32 Skyline GT-R looking great on bronze Volk TEs…

Bill Master, aka Master of the EP3, arrives in his turbocharged Civic. The lady in the pink is the one chasing me around asking me if cars will catch on fire again. I hid because I just can’t guarantee that type of thing…

Jackie Law and his beautifully-assembled turbocharged AP1 S2000 build running a Voltex front and J’s Rear wing with titanium wing stands. Always love seeing the guys from LEVEL ONE and their cars showing on the other side of the pond….

The best parts of these events are always the roll-in and roll-outs after…

Yoshi’s Infiniti G sedan on polished Volk Racing CE28…

Huy Hoang driving in with the rest of the BHM crew…

Mel Diego’s pristine EP3 followed soon after on bronze Mugen MF10…

Can’t have a car show in 2018 without at least one Porsche 911, this AWD 964 by Woooster looked spectacular low to the ground…

Garage Five executed an interesting color palette on their FK8 Civic Type R, opting for pure white Volk TE37 Ultra to contrast to the Championship white body and red accents. They even went with white graphics on the body….

Widened S15 Silvia representing DODOlogic running SSR Professor SP1…

Rocket Bunny-adorned R35 GTRon gold Rays wheels…

One of the more surprising occurrences, other than the VW catching on fire obviously, was a rare appearance by Ken Gushi and his GReddy 2JZ-powered Toyota 86 drift car…

You won’t see this happen all too often, maybe even once-in-a-lifetime, but it just so happened that Wekfest Seattle happened on the same weekend as round 5 of the Formula Drift series hosted in Monroe, WA. Since they were already in town and GReddy had a vendor booth, it made perfect sense for the Gushi-powered 86 to display at Wekfest…

Nicely executed Hakosuka Skyline GTX coupe on SSR Longchamp XR4…

I remember saving a photo of this Civic coupe years and years ago from some random site I came across and was honestly very surprised to see it at Wekfest looking exactly the same as it did ten years ago. I chatted with the owner a bit and he said that he rarely brings the car out anymore but wanted to show it at Wekfest. Pretty cool. And he was wearing a Chronicles t-shirt, haha…

Supercharged K-series DB8 Integra sedan, running a Spoon Sports front lip, Spoon brakes, and custom Volk TEs color-matched to the roll bar…

Tomas from City Stars’ Civic hatchback made an appearance this year sitting on Blitz Type 01 wheels…

Nice to see this yellow EH Civic hatchback again, this year running a Spoon Sports lip and black TEs…

Notice the rare ARC rear wing mounted on top of the OEM wing…

Nice and simple AP2 S2000 running what looks to be a J’s exhaust set-up, bronze Mugen MF10 and OEM hard top…

As you can see here, Austin Beckwith’s VW is just fine after the minor early morning fire. It sat outside while they awaited a trailer to come pick it up. Better luck next time and stay safe out there in the streets…

FD3S RX-7 sitting on Advan Racing wheels running what looks like Fujita Engineering front wide fenders…

Do you guys remember that Mugen-kitted NA1 NSX from my Year9 Anniversary Meet last year? Well, Chen Huang, who bought and imported the NSX to the USA last year, drove the car back home after my event, took the Mugen kit off, and sold the car to Jeff Diaz from Washington…

Jeff then collected his own parts, re-sprayed the body himself in Formula Red and put on this NSX-spec Mugen M7 wheels…

I swear to you, once I saw this car, my life changed, haha….I thought I was having a great day standing around so many great cars and then Ronald Khamphouvong showed-up and fucked my world with one of the best Integra builds I have ever seen. Ronald is one of the guys I hung out with when I first started hanging out in Washington with the Trikspeed guys. He’s always been kind of a quiet guy but his Integra has always looked pretty cool. I shot it for The Chronicles a few years ago and was waiting for him to eventually redo the engine bay so it would be a complete, feature-worthy build. Well, he disappeared for a while and started stacking car parts and then this happened…

The combination of parts just make for a great looking car and the engine bay is definitely done now. I was surprised to see the outcome but Ronald just has an incredible sense of style and even better execution. He went with a Crowhouse front bumper for the JDM ITR face, rare Airwalker sideskirts, Mugen Gen. II wing, Work RSZ-R wheels, and customized his J’s Racing front fenders so that the once two-vented fender had one larger single vent, resembling that of a Crowhouse fender but with not nearly as large of a vent. Such a subtle touch that changes the whole look of the fender. Amazing… I took so many photos of this fucking thing, my god. The next three parts of coverage are just of his car, haha….

Another look at Jeff’s NSX with rare Mugen hatch. Nice touch making the Spoon Sports side mirrors black to match the black roof….

Tam Phan kept his Ruckus at home this year and brought out his new E30 BMW coupe bagged on BBS wheels…

I love the fact that Washington borders Canada because we get to see so many cool builds from that side, including this Ferrari F355 Berlinetta sitting on black Work S1 2P wheels…

Crazy that they made the trip all the way from Calgary, Alberta, Canada just for Wekfest. I don’t know if the car resides in Alberta or not but that’s like, 11 hours away. Hopefully he has a trailer…

Well, that’s quite the read so I’ll leave you guys for now. I think this series of coverage will span four-parts so make sure to come back for the rest. Thanks and I appreciate you guys who actually took the time to read all this. This shit is like 5400 words!… Love ya!…