I thought Australians were good at finding excuses to slack off and go drinking.
Late last year, I attended quite a few bounenkai or “year end parties”. The word literally means “forget the year meeting”, which with the aid of lots of alcohol, isn’t hard to do.
Not only that, less than a month later, everyone is having a shinnenkai or “new year party”, in which everyone gets together and talks about how good the coming year will be, and what they’re planning to do. Last night, I attended the Garage LFW shinnenkai, who have recently announced their D1 Street Legal campaign team, headed by last year’s third-ranked Seimi Tanaka.
Garage LFW’s boss, Satoshi Nakatani, said that I don’t put enough of his stuff on Noriyaro, so here’s a shot of his S14 at engine builders STF from the other day.
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?
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.
Let’s have a look at a couple of drivers that competed in Expert Class at last weekend’s Nikko Queen, Rie Shinmi in the R34, and Michiko Yasue in the bronze S14 Silvia.
When I lived in Australia, I used to help run a drift club (www.initialdrift.com.au) that put on track days about once a month. The circuit we used most of the time was no more than an hour’s drive away from most people in Sydney, yet you’d still hear the occasional whinger complain about the distance.
This S14 Silvia belongs to a girl named Michiko. She drove about 500km/310 miles from Nagoya to Utsunomiya to drift at Nikko Circuit, then drove back home the same day.
I took the Skyline out yesterday to Honjo Circuit for a soukoukai run by Shino Kouba X Amazement. What you’re looking at is a dedicated Porsche touge drift car. The owner regularly takes it on mountain drift runs, and only brought it to the circuit after a group of his friends who were attending begged him to come.
