Tag Archive for ‘car shows’

A Surprise Appearance At An S2000 Car Meet In Mie Japan!…

A Surprise Appearance At An S2000 Car Meet In Mie Japan!…

The day after Wekfest Japan, we jumped out of bed and into our friend Eishi Suzuki’s Voltex S2000 to attend an all-S2K meet at a parking area in Mie. This was a special occasion because Eishi passed away a couple of years ago and he was once the organizer of this particular meet. His close friend still hosts the meet every year in his honor and Yasu thought it would be a great surprise if we brought his car out for it! I don’t think anyone expected it to be there but everyone was stoked when we pulled-up. The car hasn’t been brought out in public since his passing so it was important that the car be there for the gathering he once hosted…

One Of The Main Reasons Why I Came Back…WEKFEST JAPAN

One Of The Main Reasons Why I Came Back…WEKFEST JAPAN

As many of you may have figured it out by now, one of the reasons why I returned to Japan in 2022 was to attend the Wekfest event in Nagoya. I’ve been to every single one since the very beginning, with the exception of last year’s due to the global “thing”. It felt weird not coming back, especially since it has long become a regular checkmark on my annual travel calendar. When I found out that there was an opportunity to return, I leaped at the opportunity. This year was a bit different for me. I decided I wanted to experience the show as a spectator and shoot the event for myself. There were so many great builds that I wished there was more time to cover it all, but I had to find a balance between vlogging and photography…so, here is the video portion of my adventures at this Wekfest event…

Just A Regular Day For Car Guys In Japan…

Just A Regular Day For Car Guys In Japan…

As I begin to settle into my stay in Osaka, Japan, we get to work on some of the cars that are going to Wekfest Japan, spend a day-off in Osaka, and stop by a local car meet before getting back to work. This is just your average day in Japan for car enthusiasts like Yasu and myself. I promised I’d be doing more videos while I’m here and though they might not be daily, I’ll continue to upload as often as time permits while I’m here!…

GReddy RX S-Roc Skyline Returns, VTEC Club Round 2, and Der’s Civic Update!!… CHRNCLS Vlog 2022

GReddy RX S-Roc Skyline Returns, VTEC Club Round 2, and Der’s Civic Update!!… CHRNCLS Vlog 2022

It’s been awhile but we’re back!! 2022 has started off kinda crazy for us over here. Though we haven’t made a video this year, there is so much going on behind the scenes!! While we are busy planning out the rest of 2022, we provide you guys with some updates on Ryan Der’s Civic build, we meet the legendary GReddy RX S-Roc for the first time, Kenji from GReddy tells us a fantastic story about his history with the S-Roc, and I stop by round 2 of the VTEC Club USA event at Buttonwillow Raceway!!

Phantom Day 2022 Coverage… Part 2…

Phantom Day 2022 Coverage… Part 2…

Back with the rest of the photos from the recent “Phantom Day” event held in Chiba, Tokyo, Japan. Though this was a smaller event, I can imagine how much fun it would have been to just walk around all day and shoot some of these builds while shooting the shit with my friends over there. Hopefully sooner than later, I’ll be able to do just that when I can head back to Japan. For now, we’ll just have to look at these great photos captured by Yasutaka Shimomukai from Exceed Japan. I’m glad he’s been around me long enough to understand what cars I’d capture and what angles I like to shoot them at. He sends them over to me and I process them the same way I process my own photos. The end result are photos that look just like mine, honestly. Only people that are incredibly familiar with my photography and level of detail will notice the differences.

Phantom Day 2022 Coverage… Part 1…

Phantom Day 2022 Coverage… Part 1…

Admittedly, I’m a bit bummed because I wasn’t able to attend Tokyo Auto Salon this year due to the ongoing global shitstorm. I thought Yasu was going to go, at least, but I couldn’t even convince him to be inside the Makuhari Messe venue and be exposed to the plethora of possibly infected humans. I knew I was going to miss 2021 because they cancelled the event outright but was looking forward to going back in 2022. This actually marks the first time I’ve ever missed a TAS event since I first started attending back in 2013. From what I heard from friends in Japan, the event was much smaller and the crowd was definitely smaller, which was expected. I think my friends were trying to make me feel better because the show wasn’t nearly as big as it has been in the past but the thought of just being able to shoot the cars there with a smaller crowd sounded amazing. It’s usually pretty impossible to get a clean shot while the show is going on but from what I’ve seen of the photos posted online, you could definitely tell that the show was smaller. I’m hoping Japan re-opens by spring time so I can finally return and visit friends there but at this rate, who really knows?…

There’s A CR-X Inside This Fancy House… CHRNCLS Vlog 2021 #29

There’s A CR-X Inside This Fancy House… CHRNCLS Vlog 2021 #29

As we begin to approach the end of 2021, things definitely haven’t slowed down during the holiday season and I found myself in Austin, Texas for the final stop of the Wekfest tour. We take a quick tour of some of the more notable cars there and when I got back home, I was invited by Ryan Basseri from Rywire to check-out a private unveiling of a new CR-X build he had been working on. The unique thing about this particular reveal was that it was actually held inside of his house that he had just finished renovating recently! One of his dreams had always been to have a space inside his house to display a car but we never thought that he would actually do it!!

Wekfest San Jose 2021 Coverage… Part 2…

Wekfest San Jose 2021 Coverage… Part 2…

I am currently sitting on a kitchen counter top in Austin, Texas as I type out this concluding portion of the San Jose Wekfest coverage. It’s about 9PM Texas time and we just wrapped-up dinner at the AirBnb house we are staying at, just a couple days away from the last Wekfest show of 2021. It’s been a pretty wild year to say the least. It started out a bit slow, the months dragged on it seemed, but then by mid-summer, things just took-off. Things started to open back up, there seemed to be an endless amount of car meets going on every weekend, and indoor car shows officially resumed. In the past two months, we’ve done three Wekfest events that took us from Seattle, back home to Los Angeles, and to San Jose for the ‘Super Bowl’…

Wekfest San Jose 2021 Coverage… Part 1…

Wekfest San Jose 2021 Coverage… Part 1…

Top to bottom, in terms of overall car quality, this might be the best San Jose Wekfest we’ve ever had. I know that sounds a bit outrageous but you have to consider the level of cars that are being built in 2021. Coming into the event, we already had about 10 cars that were definitely going to win an award in the higher-tiered categories. It was just a matter of where we were going to place each car. It’s pretty crazy. In the past, there were probably 1-3 that were going to be up for contention for “Car of the Festival”, which is our version of the best of show, but never was there this much competition. I don’t know if it had to do with timing, since SEMA had just happened a few weeks before or because everyone had so much time off to work on their cars due to the pandemic, but people have really stepped it up. I’m happy to see it. I think through out the last year or so, I had been looking forward to just getting back on the road and doing car shows again. There was hope that there would be some new car builds on the horizon, but I didn’t really know what to expect. It just felt nice to be outside doing car shit again. In the past few months, we did back-to-back shows with Seattle and Los Angeles but there was added pressure to make San Jose good because it was the ‘big’ one…