SPRING DRIFT MATSURI 2010: Too many photos of instant yakisoba

May 10, 2010 3:39 am Published by

For those of you who took some time to watch the live camera feed, here’s how it looked from the other side!

Right next to where I was pitting, Koguchi Power’s Yoshinori Koguchi had set up a mini workshop. It looked like about ten to fifteen of his customers were there too.

Koguchi was going out for test drives, taking passenger rides to give driving technique advice and doing suspension adjustments on their cars. Koguchi’s girlfriend was filming everyone’s runs into the first corner too. Sounds like a pretty good way to build customer loyalty!

He didn’t have his D1 car there, but he had his C33 Laurel missile.

As usual, there were a few grip cars there as well, taking advantage of the plentiful track time.

I think I may have mentioned this before, but this is basically the same view that you can see from the bathroom stalls on Higashi Course. You can watch drifting while you crap. Nice.

These are the old R33 GT-R wheels I had on my previous Skyline. One of them had a crack in it that would create a slow leak, but I had it welded up so they wouldn’t go to waste. The outside shoulder of this tyre looks OK, but the rest of it is bald. I think this was right after I finished them off at Kita Course.

You might be wondering about the title of this post. After going through the few photos I actually took at Matsuri, a lot of them turned out to be of the Peyang Chou Oomori (Really Big) Yakisoba I ate on Saturday.

This is the extra large version that has twice as much as the regular size.

The sauce in this stuff is addictively good. First, like any other instant noodles, you need to boil some water.

Next, you put in the freeze dried cabbage bits. Some people put these under the noodles, but I leave them on top.

In goes the hot water.

Make sure you fold these little tabs back before putting the lid on to let the noodles cook, otherwise your fingers will be scorched with steam if you try and open them later.

After waiting for, three minutes I think it was, pour the water out. Don’t forget to wash your filthy hands either.

Mix in the sauce and the other little sachets of spice powder and furikake stuff.

Yum. I keep a pair of screw-together chopsticks in my toolbox, since it’s a bit more civilised than the disposable stuff. You know you’re in Japan when you keep chopsticks in your toolbox.

The Japanese word for chopsticks is “hashi”, with the emphasis on the “ha”, like “HAshi”. If you say “haSHI”, it means “bridge”. If you put the English word “my” before the name of any personal object, it means it’s something you bring along to use that would normally be supplied.

So, you’d have “my hashi” at a restaurant or “my ball” at a bowling alley. “My car” is self explanatory. I remember hearing Taniguchi once say “Watashi no my car” on a D1 video, which is sort of like saying “ATM machine”.

Well, there’s the Mark II’s first proper panel ding. The most annoying thing about it is that kouki taillights are pretty expensive to replace.

I also added a couple of ripples to the doors right near the b-pillar when I was out on Kita Course doing some close driving with Naoto Suenaga and a couple of other cars. I was right on the tail of an R34 GT-t when he missed a shift and I gave him a bit of a tap.

I pitted-in shortly after that, and as I got out of the car, I saw a guy with some dark sunglasses striding straight towards me, flanked by a couple of other guys.

I was expecting him to angrily say something like “Hey, you hit me out there!” but what came out of his mouth was “Sorry about that! I missed a shift and the car straightened up! I’m really sorry!”

Heh, that wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. I had only left a little dent on his car, and it was on a part of the body hidden by the rear bumper, which he had already removed. No problem. I still bought him a bottle of green tea from the vending machine though.

At least it wasn’t as bad as this Silvia! This is Kouji-san’s car, as seen in a previous post from Okegawa Sports Land.

Clean one minute, junk the next. Drifting can be a bit like going all-in on a gamble sometimes.

Of course, sometimes it gets beyond the point of caring.

Can anyone (who doesn’t live in Japan) guess what car that right rear taillight comes from?

Christian Pickering said I wasn’t taking enough photos of the people at Matsuri, so here’s a big one of him.

Dino duckmouthedly deciding which burger he’s going to eat next at the Powervehicles barbeque lunch.

Team Orange’s Naoto Suenaga thought it was delicious.

Any tyre will do for some people, it seems.

Andy had his JZX90 out on Nishi to take advantage of the limited afternoon practice we could get on the short course layout. The Nishi track is usually run as a full circuit during Matsuri, but they change it to the layout used in D1SL competitions for an hour and a half on both afternoons.

Both Andy and I were running on last resort tyres, which meant speeds were getting progressively slower and slower as our tyres went off, but at least they went off at the same time.

That’s the little door ripple I was talking about before. There’s also a bit of red paint in there from a 180SX that I nudged on Kita Course.

That’s it for my photos until the Summer Matsuri, but I’ll be posting up some other pics and videos taken by other people in the next couple of days too.

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This post was written by Alexi

22 Comments

  • BlueSlug says:

    very educational 8)

  • NICK says:

    AWESOME ALEXI!! Seeing this stuff makes me more desprite (spelt wrong but you get the point) to get there! good to see the mark II getting some drift scars!! That chaser of Andys looks staunch as hell LOVE IT! Keep up the great work! Thanx From NZ!!

  • GenJi says:

    What in the unholy name of . . ?! Are those missile cars ? . . damn, they sure had fun with them.

    I think i’ve seen those rear lights somewhere, but i just can’t remember 😀 ..

  • Paul says:

    That shit will buff out. While your up.

  • STJ says:

    Its a cresta not a chaser.

  • Ben Comana says:

    Pure Jealousy! Great Stuff….

  • fury-s12 says:

    those noodles look delicious as does the view from the crapper lol

    great coverage man specially if you consider this to be less coverage and more drifting on you part would love to see what you call full coverage

  • Henry says:

    I’ve never seen anyone drift on tiny spares… But I’ve got two in my garage 😉 I’m guessing it will feel like double horsepower..?! ROFL! Hopefully I can make it sometime soon to one of these matsuri events…

  • Isidro says:

    righteous.
    if only everybody else recapped their experience in drift events the way you did.

  • Rob says:

    Yakisoba!!! Love it.

    I must admit though the food they sell at Ebisu is pretty good, it’s so much better than any food you can pick up at Oran, EC, QR etc. Marulan is stepping it up though 🙂

  • Matt says:

    Nice meeting you again! Sorry about the drunk-talk 😛

  • Guardian-X- says:

    Nice pics and write-up!

    Btw what’s with all those spare wheels? :p hope nobody drift’s on those ^^

  • Pete says:

    still dont get why people drift nice cars. such a waste..

    but on a serious note, what is the name of the wheels you run on the fronts Alexi?

  • spirit ドリフト says:

    that tail light is off a Prince!!!

  • x8slider says:

    Man awesome, thanks for the coverage Alexi!

    In time I have learnt to stop worrying about dings and scratches. Looking at pictures like these, I never worry anymore about how my car looks. Its about driving and I love that.

    Sorry boss I just gotta go to the toilet, again (runs to Higashi course)

  • Slappy says:

    “You can watch drifting while you crap.”….HAHAHA

  • Benny says:

    Awesome Alexi! It was nice meeting you! keep up the mint posts 🙂

  • Adam says:

    Looks like banger racing.

  • banpei says:

    The tail light on the smashed up R32 is from a Subaru Vivio Bistro. I’m not from Japan, so what does that say about me? Probably that I spend too much time on remembering trivial details and searching back in my rss reader. 😀
    BTW: what do I win? A cookie? Or a nice bowl of ramen? 😛

  • Alexi says:

    @Pete
    Racing Hart CP-035.

    @banpei
    Wow, I’m impressed.

    You win internet cred, which cannot be bought with money. 🙂

  • banpei says:

    Yay! The eternal internet cred! That’s even better than a bowl of ramen! 😉

  • Frank says:

    Ah! The huge face shot of that dude scared me.