Pay attention. It is possible to make an interesting drift video that contains closeups of weeds blowing in the wind.
This video was made by a guy called Eiji from the Australian team Red Stage (here’s a pic), and a member of my old club, Initial Drift. He came to the last summer drift matsuri with a couple of other guys and pretty much had a camera in his hand the whole time.
Keep an eye out for the “Team Mad Max” Skyline, especially at 3:35 where I actually make a somewhat decent run on Minami! Also, the guy I shake hands with is Luke Fink, the recent winner of the Australian drift championship, after we won the Drift Land twin competition.
Something interesting popped into my Youtube subscription box the other day. Remember those videos of JR in Japan? They’ve been re-uploaded in HD!
So, here they are, linked for your convenience.
Click here for Part One – JR visits street drifting in Osaka.
At 0:57 seconds, where you can see me driving the van and looking to the left in the rear-view mirror. I was looking at a police car! This being an official Ford video though, they couldn’t show that sort of thing…
Click here for Part Four – JR at Ebisu.
This was also fun, mostly because I snuck off to the North Course when nothing was happening and had a good go at it.
Click here for JR visiting a takoyaki stand.
I was slaving away in a hotel room on two hours of sleep trying to get photos uploaded while everyone else went out to Amemura and had fun.
Click here for the Japanese parking bit.
I think this was Gay Andy’s idea to see what happened when the car disappeared into the mysterious expanse of an automated Japanese parking garage.
OK, so Luke’s been bugging me to put up a video from his We Are Drift video project. Here’s the latest trailer he put together of the D1SL event at Ebisu Circuit that we were at last month.
Keep an eye out for the part in this video where you can see me ignoring Andy from Powervehicles. while talking to Emily and scratching myself.
I was recently sent this video by Vidas from Lithuania. Believe it or not, Lithuania is a fairly big viewer of this website!
Here’s what he had to say: “This weekend we had our drifting championship final, and we made a small video about it. I thought maybe you and your readers would be interested about it.”
I received an email the other day from Terrell with a link to the Nissan Pacific website. Here’s a recent video of the Pacific Northwest guys driving in the Evergreen Drift series at Evergreen Speedway. Lots of fairly decent looking cars in there!
This next video from over the border in Canada is from David Vickers, one of a couple of guys who visited Japan a little while ago. This video was made as his submission for the eBay Motors Master competition. Despite his ridiculously boro hachi and stupid hipster haircut, apparently he has two cute girls that hang around him all day and help him work on his car.
Any Sprinter guys who would like to help David win the eBay competition he made this video for, visit the eBay Motors Master website and rate his video.
Produced by Mark Boxer, a member of Team Cunningstunts and builder of the rather cool Bladerod bike (I sat on it one time, and Mark yelled at me for not putting the kickstand up by hand), Phat Sliggity is two hours of awesome.
D1 Synchro Drift
The Old Man Who Drifts a Little Bit, Final
The 117th Ikasu Hashiriya Team Tengoku (Ikaten) at Meihan Sportsland
Four Door Men Meeting at Nikko Circuit
By request, here’s a higher-quality re-upload of this old video, shot by myself and Laurence Janus (who made this famous video).
The driver is my good mate Yoshio Takahashi. His nickname is “Rii-chan”, which comes from the fact he is the leader of his drift team (say “leader” in a Japanese accent to understand), called “Side Attack”. If you put “-chan” on the end of someone’s name, it’s kind of like making their name sound cute, sort of like saying “Stevie” instead of “Steven”.
A few years ago when I was still just visiting Japan instead of living here, I visited a Drift Matsuri at Ebisu Circuit. Rii-chan was quite insistant that Laurence and I ride in his car on the high-speed Higashi course before the end of the event, because linking the front straight over the blind crest with his TD-06 SR20DET was his specialty at the time.
Just before the spin, you can hear the tyres making flapping noises as they delaminated, but Rii-chan wasn’t going to stop, even on the steep downhill section of Higashi. He was more concerned about my having a good time than he was about crashing! Before you ask about his helmet, it was a souvenir from an old job of his, and no, it’s not exactly regulation.
While we’re on the subject, does anyone else think there’s something majorly wrong with a lot of the drifting videos coming out these days? Am I the only person who doesn’t really want to see an entire video of high contrast slow-motion with tightly-cropped focus pulling, shots of weeds blowing in the wind and other things that have nothing to do with anything? Without some sort of narrative, human interest or personality to the video, it’s like eating a cake made entirely of icing.
Come on guys, you obviously have the skills behind the lens and with the mouse. I know you can do it. If you don’t want to change your style, but still want to make a nice cake, I’ll have a chocolate-orange marble sponge please.
I suppose I should put up or shut up and make my own videos eh? Uh-oh, did I just volunteer to do even more work? Who wants to sponsor Noriyaro with a nice little HD camera then?
Wow, look at that entry by Tezuka. I’ve heard people say that the reason he can drive so well is because he has nothing between his ears.
I would have liked to go to Okayama, but it was a bit too far to drive, and I was entered in a practice day at Honjo Circuit the following day. More about that in another post.
A few days ago, I posted up these videos, shot and edited by Jos Roder, of what happened before and after our trip to Ebisu Circuit for the 2007 Autumn Drift Matsuri.
Here’s what happened in between, which some people might consider to be the most important part of the series! Jos has also been nice enough to answer some of the many questions you may have about Drift Matsuri in his video.
