Photos and Words by Joey Lee (@Stickydiljoe)

The winds of change are coming. They are. I just don’t know when, exactly. I feel it though. We are on the verge of a shift. California has been in a bit of a lull in the last few years. What was once the most active region in North America’s custom car community has been rocked to sleep by the ‘stance’, followed by the once-wild craze that was the bolt-on widebody era. That is still going strong by the way, with people finding every reason they can to somehow adapt over fenders onto literally anything, but it has hit its peak I feel. It’s time for a change. What is coming next we can’t really say, but in the next few years, I think many of us will finally be ready to move away from the wild modifications and putting everything you can onto a vehicle for instant gratification. Perhaps things will begin to shift back to cleaner execution where people will find more subtle ways to alter a vehicle’s appearance…

That’s all wishful thinking of course…

I think I’ve just become a bit bored of what we have here at home…

And that’s not a good thing.

Fads will come and go, that’s been a proven fact. I don’t mind the stuff that is popular right now, I’m just ready to experience something new. I suppose it’s not so much the current trends that are bothering me but more so the saturation. We just have too much here. Too many events, too many car enthusiasts, people trying to do too much, too many people trying to be a ‘brand’…it’s all just too much excess. We’re drowning. If you’re living in the middle of nowhere with little-to-no car stuff going on, you’re probably thinking ‘Oh, must be nice’, one must consider the classic saying from author Mark Twain that ‘too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is never enough’….

Not only do we have too much, we’re also drinking whatever whiskey is available to us. We’ve forgotten what good whiskey is. And now everybody is trying to brand their own whiskey too. And most of these people don’t know how to make whiskey…

Whiskey is a metaphor, obviously.

There’s just too much.

The only way to really ‘fix’ this is to cut-down. But….we are living in an age of excess and as such, people don’t like to slow down. Give us more. MORE. Because in the off-chance we do slow down…my god….the ‘Likes’ will stop coming. And if the Likes stop coming how will people see our cars? The next guy isn’t slowing down so why should we? How will we continue to sell our merchandise if we don’t get the Likes? Who will know who we are if people don’t see us at the multitude of events that happen here in sunny California? Our numbers, our metrics, how do we keep up????!!!!

STOP.

Just.

Stop.

Breathe. Take a step back. If you’re doing anything of significance, they will find their way to you. You don’t have to be overexposed. The problem is that so many of you are not doing anything of significance. You are merely existing. You’re not doing anything special—at least not yet, anyway. You are cramming one another into the collective throats of your peers. You are not a brand. You should be a car enthusiast.

The irony is that we have all at one time or another stared at our social media accounts and laughed at the girls who are striving so hard to be ‘models’. These girls are constantly overexposing themselves, showing too much, trying to represent this idea of how their lives are supposed to be seen in the eyes of regular people. Every day, they gotta make that post, they gotta get that photo up on their accounts or else they will be forgotten…

A lot of the car enthusiasts these days are essentially Instagram models. You just use your car as an avatar to show the world how you think people should see you. You want free shit, you want to be ‘sponsored’, and then you turn around and tell people you build cars for a living and they should buy your shit… Now you’re a ‘public figure’…

You’re no different than the models you make light of…

There are just too many outlets for us out here in California to fuel this…this madness, if you will. Car events are just real-life versions of social media. Isn’t that ironic? It’s basically Instagram…Live. Get it?… They’ve become a means to an end to sell an image instead of offer a space to share ideas, stories, and to build a community. You go home with more enemies than friends because somebody bested you for a $5 trophy and they hurt your ‘brand’…

The idea is to ‘be the change that you wish to see in the world’. Or so it has been said. I think those winds of change are coming. Because some of us are trying very hard to make that happen. The status quo is no longer acceptable to us. Personally, for myself, I think I’d just like to be excited about what is happening at home again. I don’t exactly recall who it was I was talking to a few weekends ago when I was at the annual Wekfest LA event, but I remember them asking me how it felt to be back at home after just experiencing the ‘better show’ in Seattle. I’m paraphrasing of course but that was the jist of it. I chuckled with a bit of ambiguity, not wanting to give away whether or not I was scoffing at the idea or agreeing with him. It was a friend of mine that asked and I’m sure he knew what my reaction meant.

It’s getting harder to be excited but goddammit, I’m trying. I think collectively as a group, we are all trying. When I say ‘we’, I mean myself and the guys from Wekfest. These guys are my friends and most of us have been friends for years now outside of the show. We’ve experienced any and everything within the automotive tuning community for over a decade now and have seen not only what it once was, but what it has become. In the last few years, as the show tour has grown to many more cities within North America, we’ve experienced even more. We’ve had the opportunity to see and speak to the people during many of these stops all over, and its given us a genuine perspective of just how different every region is. Being gone presents us with the opportunity to embrace what we have at home, but there are also many instances when it has presented us with even more opportunities to understand exactly what it is that we don’t enjoy…

In a smaller market, or say, a less saturated community, you come to see how much people enjoy it when a quality event comes into town. There’s a general sense of excitement there because they either have smaller events or ‘pocket shows’ that don’t aim for quality and just want to fill the building to make a dollar. With Wekfest building the strong reputation that it has over the years, generally speaking, the better car builds come out because they want to be showcased with the other top-tier builds from their area. For a tour stop like Seattle, they don’t have nearly as many events to go to so the enthusiasts from that area build specifically for that show. They know that the best cars will be coming from the surrounding areas so they want to represent to their fullest. Japan, though you can not ever consider it a small market, has transitioned to that way of thinking now where guys build specifically to show their best work at the Wekfest events because they see quality cars there and they want to be on-par or better. They don’t have nearly as many events to attend so its become a marker on their annual calendars…

California is a little different. Well, it’s A LOT different. To be fair to my Californians, I still don’t believe that there is a better region that has a better collective of car enthusiasts, pound-for-pound, who can build cars like we can. We have better car builds at some of our local car meets than many car shows have in other states. Half of that is because we just have REALLY good builds here and the other half is simply because some of these really great cars would rather just go to car meets than spend another 8-10 hour day at a car show. Those are facts, people. We have so many car events that people DON’T WANT TO GO TO THEM ANYMORE. How spoiled are we?

There are times when we’ll miss a big event and it won’t be a big deal because there will be another big event two weeks later…

“Eh, we’ll just go next time.”

Eventually we just keep thinking there will be another big event after and we will just stop going altogether. I’ve been going to car shows since the late ’90s. That’s a lot of car shows. I’ve missed a couple of them. When you get older, it gets easier to miss shit. Trust me. I think that’s also why so many of my older car buddies who are amazing car builders just come out to meets now or don’t show up at all. It’s just too much work to sit in traffic, risk getting pulled-over, or wait around all day to be at a car show. You can just try all over again next week—or not try. You also realize when you get older that car shows and the like are activities for the youths. There’s a lot of trendy shit that the older people don’t necessarily agree with and you find yourself becoming the ‘old man that just wants the damn kids off your lawn’. You just begin to hate shit and don’t try to do anything to fix it. It’s just easier to shake your proverbial cane at a phone screen than do it in person.

I think many of us have forgotten that this hobby of ours is a very visual experience. The more we see, the more we take-in, and the more we learn by example. If we stop presenting examples of what we enjoy seeing or don’t display the proper techniques of how to execute a great car build, eventually, everybody loses. That’s why we have so much clutter and crap, especially with knock-off parts in our community because these shit companies have saturated our market. The younger car enthusiasts or those who are just getting into this great hobby of ours don’t know better than to use these products because we don’t provide better examples. The more these overnight, often half-assed, builds are presented to the masses,  (because of the plethora of events we have here) the more they become the examples of what people think are ‘good builds’.

And then that ultimately becomes the new status quo.

Your JP Fiberglass fake Rocket Bunny kit and Cosmis wheels is not a great build. And your car doesn’t make me ‘Imagine the World Living Life in Peace’. It actually makes me not want to go to car shows. Sincerely, everybody.

But, that’s also our fault. We haven’t been there to provide you with better examples. We’ve just become complacent in our efforts to make the community better, we’ve come to accept the status quo…

‘Too much of anything is a bad thing’.

Fixing this will require a group effort and a lot of time. It’s been years of neglect and it won’t happen overnight. We gotta fight the little battles. It’ll be difficult to change the mentality of instant gratification, it’s a big motivation for people out here. But the more you present an alternative mindset, a different way of thinking than that of immediate results, the better the opportunity to create change. All we can do is try, right?…

I haven’t really figured out how to combat the saturation we are experiencing. Perhaps that too will take some time. We’ve already seen a shift as of late where one of the major events out here has met its untimely end, possibly being resurrected again as something new. We shall see if that comes to fruition and how it will operate differently this time around in an effort to meet success. Many of the smaller events will come and go as time passes because they’re just here temporarily to collect a few checks. They just want a piece of the pie, they’re not in it for the long haul. It’s become such a competitive market doing car shows, yet its also become very clear which ones are the front-runners…

I honestly think we’re doing something great here, at Wekfest I mean. I’ve been on their tour since 2012, been attending since its inception in 2009, and the last few years have been huge as we’ve restructured pretty much everything internally to create a better experience that is geared more towards building community. Everybody has a specific task and we all just seem to work fluidly with one another. It’s very much an automotive gathering created for car enthusiasts, by car enthusiasts. That’s so key. We’re not financiers who leaped at the chance to make money off something that was popular, we don’t rely on corporate sponsors, and we aren’t just guys who are trying to fuck the models we hire disguised as a car show. We’re just car guys. We just want to create a better automotive community collectively. Awards come as a byproduct because we are a ‘car show’ but the experience is what matters. Don’t get me wrong, we take the judging-side of it very seriously. We just look at it a little differently and operate outside of the conventional points system. Most like it, because they understand that we our car guys with a deep résumé, some don’t understand it, finding comfort in the traditional points criteria of yesteryear…

All we can do now is the same thing I’ve been doing here at The Chronicles for the better part of a decade; simply lead by example. It’s the willingness to continue to put in the work which will create the necessary change to make California great as it once was…

With ALL that said, let’s get into some photos from the 2019 Wekfest Los Angeles event. This was the second iteration of the Southern California Wekfest show since moving away from the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Same building but a different hall, which made for a new experience. I’ll get into that later in the following posts to come. I haven’t quite finished all the photos yet but it should be around 3-parts. Nothing out of the norm here so enjoy…

I had my friend Sang’s J’s Racing GT widebody S2000 at my shop for a few weeks leading up to Wekfest LA. He needed a place to store the car after Spocom Anaheim and before I spoke to him at the show, he was gonna leave it on the street at his other friend’s place since he had to work out of town until Wekfest. I was pretty tight on space but didn’t want him to leave his car out on a public street so I told him to just leave it at the shop. Luckily Yasu was also in town from Japan so he actually helped drive the car to the Los Angeles Convention Center that morning of set-up while I brought all my booth stuff in my Pilot. I really enjoy Sang’s S2000 because it has all the right parts on it but is still a little rough around the edges since he loves to drive the shit out of it. He’s also one of the few guys I know that has a wing so fucking big that it physically warps his trunk…

One of the changes that we’ve really been trying to make, by example, is reshaping the way people look at display booths. As many of you witnessed at the San Jose Wekfest show, we’ve begun putting a bigger emphasis on the overall aesthetic. If people really are trying to create this idea that they are a ‘brand’, we’d like to see how creative they can get with it by creating better visuals to represent who or what they are. Utilizing a canopy indoors just seems a little dated and almost a bit tacky these days, so we looked to other events outside of the automotive realm like Agenda and Complexcon for inspiration…

For San Jose, we used a custom wood display built by one of the Wekfest staff members and for Los Angeles, we further evolved that idea with a custom-built 30×8 foot wood-frame display with a complete visual display front and back…

All of this was the work of both Kenneth Li’s ideas and our boy Salem’s physical execution of it, thanks in part to his experience working trade shows in the toy industry and being able to assemble displays like it. The frame was mocked-up before being delivered to the show in sections where we pieced it together and then a team of helpers laid down the large format print…

Ken’s big body Benz that he rarely drives…

One of the first vehicles that rolled-in that Saturday morning was the Infinitewerks Lexus LS460 on their version of the classic Junction Produce Scara wheels, made with the blessings of Taketomi and Junction Produce…

Chris Marion’s Integra Type R on white Titan7 wheels with its eye-catching KW livery…

Bisimoto was busy in Minneapolis for work so he had a friend drive his all-wheel drive K-turbo Civic Wagon to the show…

FD RX-7 time attack vehicle running a Racebred Components front splitter and TEs rolling in as one of the many vendor display vehicles that weekend…

This BMW E30 coupe came in sounding extremely good and we came to find out later that it actually had a Toyota 2JZ-GTE swap under the hood…

We’ve been trying to bring a wider variety of car builds to the Wekfest event so we were delighted when we found out that VTEC Club wanted to set-up a display this year. One of the cars that they brought to spotlight at their booth was Kristian Wong’s Hybrid Racing-sponsored Civic hatchback time attack project…

It is still in the process of being fully assembled and running so some of the guys helped Kristian push his car to the booth…

I don’t know what was being said that made Gene Tjin react that way he did but it was great to see him at a car show, a rare sight these days, in his own car no less. This imported DB8 Integra Type R sedan on Advan Racing AVS Model 6 wheels is actually his daily…

Kenji in his Hot Wheels Super Treasure Hunt Civic and Kevin’s white hatchback being staged before they set-up the GReddy Performance Products display inside…

Jonathan Oregon’s 450HP 13B-powered RX-7 from Enticed Motorsports which was recently featured in Super Street magazine…

I think sometimes we forget just how great the stock bodylines of the FD3S chassis are because we’re so used to seeing it with aggressive aero and bolt-on over fenders. Just take a step back and look at those lines presented in Competition Yellow Mica…

Leon Casino’s Comptech supercharged widebody Acura NSX is a regular at all major car events in Southern California…

Jonathan Liu’s S2000 is an interesting one, featuring a Sorcery front, J’s Racing front wide fenders, custom widened rear, and a really cool custom trunk that follows the lines of the Mugen hard top…

Kenji’s turbocharged Civic with some signature Los Angeles signage in the distance…

What’s more LA than the Staples Center, and old Asian guy and an EF8-converted Civic? Lol…

Answer: The Staples Center, an Old Asian guy, an EF8-converted Civic, and a mint set of SSR EX-C Neos. This is the epitome of early 2000s Los Angeles…

If the EF/ED Civic was the ultimate cruiser of the late 90s/early 2000s, the current equivalent of that in 2019 would be an BMW E92 M3 on Rotiform wheels and a roll bar…

Martin’s silver NA1 NSX featuring a custom set of individual throttle bodies…

Michael Mao’s Route KS Super Madonna NSX is another great build that you could consider to be one of the more notable SoCal car builds in the past decade…

You can also count on the other Mao brother, Bay, to drive the car to a show pretty much every time…

The guys from VTEC Club USA kept it simple with their booth display, their first-ever at a Wekfest event, with Kristian’s Civic on full display…

Noticeably missing on the Civic are C/V axles, not because they’ve discovered new Bluetooth axle-less technology, but because the car is not quite finished yet. I only bring that to your attention because the white Volk RE30 wheels look fantastic so you’ll certainly be staring at them and wondering why something seems out of place—or missing. Don’t worry, car show competitors looking for something to gripe about, this car did not compete and was used for display purposes only…

If you’re new to this build and wondering what front bumper that is, it’s actually a rare Truth Motorsports front with a modified Mode Parfume x Exceed front lip added…

Popping out of this brand new turbocharged MX-5 Miata was a really sweaty RC, formerly of RC’s Garage, after making the 7-hour trek from blazing hot Arizona with no air-conditioning…

One of the builds I was happy to see displayed at Wekfest LA this year was the Button Built Ferrari 328 which I first saw at last year’s SEMA Show in Las Vegas…

Perhaps one of the more peculiar sights from this year’s Wekfest LA was John Fob’s Lamborghini Aventador, draped in a tribute HKS livery and Advan Racing GT wheels…

How satisfying is it to see a clean stock-body S13 coupe with just a JDM Silvia front face that’s otherwise completely un-butchered?…

JDM of California’s imported yellow-wrapped RHD JZA80 Supra…

Does it make sense? No. Does it look kinda cool? Yeah….

Jeremy Allgier’s BB4 Prelude back on Advan Racing wheels featuring my newest decal placed purposefully at an odd angle to cover the crack on his windshield. This is both good advertising and functional so props for that. Please don’t anyone else waste my decal to cover cracks or damage on your vehicle in the future, lol. I am not the new Honda Band-Aid decal…

Marc’s insane Sheepey twin-turbo Lamborghini Huracan rocking a full Super Trofeo Competition conversion and custom BBS LM wheels…

Enrique’s 1992 Integra is looking great these days on Volk TEs with a JDP carbon front lip…

Looking very early 2000s-specific was this Zenki S14 featuring a Bomex rear wing, rear valance, Sprint Hart CP-R wheels, and a Navan front paired with a modified Integra front lip…

Charles Chung’s bagged ’72 W114 Mercedes 250C coupe…

Classic BMW 2002 on BBS mesh…

An overwhelming sense of nostalgia comes whenever this Milano Red DB2 Integra GS-R pulls-up with a complete set of Racing Hart Type-C Tracers. It’s so good that multiple photos were necessary…

A Gracer front lip and a set of bronze Volk TEs is sometimes all you need…

Anthony Keuth’s DA Integra from Milestone Collective on 16-inch Mugen M7…

Liu’s S2000 aired-out and prepped for the show…

The other car that was set to be on display at the VTEC Club USA booth was Amir Bentatou’s ongoing K-series turbocharged NSX build which has recently seen some significant changes under the rear hatch. The turbocharger has now been remounted to the bottom-side of the K20 swap…

Joel Tan’s Works-style 1972 Hakosuka Skyline wearing a Prince Motor Club Sports-inspired livery…

A man alone with his jack…

A rare VeilSide Fortune Model widebody Acura NSX…

SR20DET-powered Rocket Bunny Boss S14 240SX on WEDS Kranze wheels…

The dog days of summer…

In this kind of heat, it’s nice to have a bikini top of your MX-5 Miata…

I don’t often concern myself with Lamborghinis, since I’ve long known that I’ll never have the opportunity to own one, much less modify one, but sometimes there are some cars that are undeniably cool, and a street car with a Super Trofeo body is just that…

The West Hall of the L.A. Convention Center featured a narrow ramp that wasn’t the easiest to maneuver through, but at the right time of day in the afternoon, the back entrance made for some pretty moody vibes…

It took a few hours but eventually the guys finished-up the Wekfest display and it came out spectacular, to say the least. Not bad for something we’d never done before, just conceptualized and executed by a couple of car guys…

That’s all for today. Sorry for the long post. Sometimes I forget I’m a writer and I just have all this shit stewing in my brain, lol. Thanks for looking and hopefully you come back for the rest…