This weekend, my local Super Autobacs is having an opening anniversary event. Daigo Saito, Yoshinori Koguchi and D1 commentator Manabu “Mana-P” Suzuki will be there, so I would have liked to go and take some pics since I could practically walk there, but I’ll be somewhere else this weekend!
To make up for it, here’s a pic of Daigo’s D1 car at Super Autobacs, surrounded by shiny things.
3 Comments
Because you just know there’s someone out there who would pay money for this.
6 Comments
You utter a curseword and try to do something about it with the steering wheel and pedals, then there’s that sound like someone stomping on a really big soda can.
Then, silence.
You look at the other guy, nod in a gentlemen’s agreement and drive back to the pits to inspect the damage.
13 Comments
You want something different? I’ll give you something different.
18 Comments
The characters read “ハチロク魂” or “hachiroku damashii”, which means “the soul of hachiroku”.
For anyone who is also a fan of Japanese videogames, it’s the same “damashii” as in the title of the game “Katamari Damacy”.
7 CommentsA 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.
Ebisu Road Trip 'The Drift' Part 1.5 from Jos on Vimeo.
29 Comments
As promised, here are the photos from the 2009 2PD meeting at Fuji Speedway.
The 2 Pedal Drifters meeting is an annual event put on by Drift Tengoku magazine, to promote the unconventional use of slushboxes in drifting.
30 CommentsI didn’t have enough time today to process all the pics properly, so here’s a little preview!
Any info is better than none, so here’s a bit of news about what’s going on with Noriyaro at the moment.
I recently posted the 200th article on the site. Hooray!
I’m also currently back in Australia for the next two weeks, so posts might slow down a bit (what, even more?!?). I have an enormous backlog of random photos I haven’t used so far on the site though, so I’ll be going through my old stuff when I have some spare time, and posting up what I can find. Off the top of my head, I know I have some pics of a 1JZ-powered Toyota Crown wagon drift car that some of you might find interesting, as well as pics from the “2PD Meeting” for automatic-only drift cars at Fuji Speedway.
Now here’s an interesting one. I won’t be contributing any more content to the Speedhunters website.
I remember that a lot of you guys had a gut reaction of “Thanks for killing another blog I like to read, Speedhunters” when it was announced that I was going to write for them.
I should have listened, since the readers who said that are exactly the ones I’m writing this sort of stuff for.
Let’s not go into that too much though. It’s done, and I think the car blog world already has enough slow-motion “I just bought a camera that can do it” videos, or self-absorbed art-school verbal wankery where I talk about myself and my own “journey” instead of the subject, or sentences that end with “don’t you think?”.
Noriyaro is and will always be all about showing you what goes on in Japan: cool people doing cool stuff with cool cars.
I also have a couple of ideas for making Noriyaro a little bit more interactive. More on that another time!
38 CommentsHere are a couple of videos made by Jos Roder, an Australian guy who used to live in Osaka a couple of years ago.
I was on a short trip to Japan at the time, and wanted to go and see the Autumn Drift Matsuri at Ebisu Circuit. After working out the best way to rig my itinerary, it turned out that www.dr1ft.jp‘s Laurence wanted to go too, and so did Jos, who was kind enough to volunteer his drifter S14 Silvia to get there if we split the costs.
Osaka to Nihonmatsu is a fairly long drive by Japanese standards though, and the highway tolls would have cost 15,550円 according to the trip planner on the Nexco (highway company) website. We decided that this was money worth saving, so we took the low roads to get there. This seemed to be cheapest (but definitely not most stress-free) way of getting there.
Slow average speeds, no open petrol stations, traffic lights, stopping for roadworks and navigating in the dark made for a much more interesting trip than taking the boring-old highway. Laurence’s planning with the map was spot-on though, and we didn’t take a single wrong turn the whole way.
2007 Autumn Drift Matsuri Epic Road Trip (Part 1) from Jos on Vimeo.
18 Comments