THIS TIME FOR SURE: Signing up for the 1JZ Meeting

One-make events are generally a lot of fun, and attending the recent AE86 day at Fuji Speedway was awesome, but since it was a car that I neither own, nor have owned in the past, I was missing out on that little extra edge that the event provided.

Since my own car is a JZX100, the event to attend is the annual 1JZ Meeting held at Fuji Speedway Drift Course by four-door pro shop, ST Garage. I thought I’d posted up all of the the pics from a previous 1JZ Meeting that I attended back in 2007, but I’ve only put up a few so far, like this one and this one and this one.

As you can see, there’s some interesting stuff going on there.

When I bought the Mark II last year, the event had already been sold out for a long time, which annoyed me a bit and I didn’t actually end up going, even to watch. This year, I decided that the car would be going out there on the track no matter what. The problem was that entries to the event always sell out within a few hours of opening.

To avoid any kind of mess-ups with faxing my entry through and bank deposits, I decided to drive down to ST Garage instead and enter directly.

I had heard that entries opened at 10:00AM and usually sold out by midday. Since it was a weekday, and I didn’t want to take the non-discounted weekday expressway there, I decided to leave early in the morning.

The non-expressway route to ST Garage, which is down past Fuji Speedway, mostly involves pleasantly winding roads which were mostly deserted.

OK, so I took a short bit of expressway to avoid some boring suburban traffic.

That’s my mobile phone there on the dash serving as a navigation system.

When I arrived there at about six in the morning, I found this guy called Kaneda who had driven all the way from Nagano with a big wad of entries from his friends. Notice the kouki Cresta grille conversion.

“One Hundred Samurai”, it says. That is, “a samurai of the 100” not “one hundred samurais”.

It was a fair wait until the entries opened, so I put my feet up for a bit.

A few hours later and a lot more people had showed up to enter. There were about thirty all up.

This girl had about two thousand dollars to pay for all the entry forms she had. Most people there had a bunch of entry forms they were handing in for their friends.

As soon as the clock struck ten, the ST Garage fax machine began spitting out entry after entry.

Sacchan turned up to enter as well! The actual event is at Fuji Speedway on the 19th of September, so you can expect a photo or two from that.

Categorised in: Alexi アレクシ

This post was written by Alexi