NOT QUITE OLD SCHOOL JUST YET: Drift Matsuri 2006, Part I

May 4, 2011 3:35 am Published by

Since most of my interesting photos from last weekend’s Drift Matsuri are already spoken for, by which I mean the ones without arses in them, here’s some pics from the 2006 Spring Drift Matsuri at Ebisu Circuit, the first one I ever attended.

This is my Australian friend Josh getting his AE86 ready behind some wheels I posed for this shot, since I was hoping the article would run in a magazine, which it did.

Yep, it looked like a heap of junk, but it ran pretty well.

Back then there weren’t any weekend or holiday period discounts for the expressways like there are now, so we all drove up on the low roads. Doing this makes it take over six hours instead of about three, so I’m not a huge fan of doing it, even if it does save ~$65 in tolls. Keep in mind it’s only a distance of about 280km as well. Unless you’re on a plane or bullet train, it takes a long time to get anywhere in Japan.

Yep, here comes that sun. No sleep today then.

Once you’re in the gate, it’s time to drive in there as fast as you can to get the pit you like. I usually end up staying at Higashi course since it’s nice and quiet, apart from people doing massive sanpatsu drifts down the front straight.

Josh was keen to head out, and since I didn’t have a car at this time, I went where he went.

School course for some warming up…

…then onto the Touge course.

This kid watching was quite impressed with Josh’s driving (I think because he more or less held the accelerator flat around the entire course), and was more than happy to go for a passenger ride.

Kumakubo is always happy to hang around with the drivers. Who’s that there on the left? Could it be Antonio?

This is my friend Yoshio killing on the front straight at Higashi, and this is also me failing at taking action shots. I think I had only just bought my first digi SLR at this time.

I guess that’s sort of better.

Man, taking photos of cars is hard.

Evening is for eating barbecue in the pits, and discussing what courses will be driven later that night.

More to come tomorrow!

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This post was written by Alexi

7 Comments

  • Fujimoto says:

    what an awesome lifestyle … it might be hard moving to japan but this is the lifestyle im dreaming every night … (sorry for my bad english)

  • Matto says:

    Antonio!! 😀

  • Donnie says:

    Fuji gotta do it… Military got me here.. but I want more of it… so I may get out to do more freely. Im not fluent in Japanese though so could be rough.

  • Dietmar says:

    These pictures look familiar.. I think I remember some of them being in an old High Performance Imports magazine?

  • David says:

    Hey Alexi do you mind sending me an email? I’ve been trying to contact you since we last talked!

  • tim says:

    lol, the blue passenger helmet of josh’s is now my passenger helmet, hope that flano wear’a don’t have cooties