This was one of my favorites probably.

And yeah – he is eating with both hands while driving.

I just randomly found this picture of me on a french website.  I guess it’s somehow related to Mulsanne… I remember befriending an older French guy with Mulsanne on his business card.  I think that same business is somehow involved with a local drift team in Southern California.

Anyway, the picture is of me driving the KAAZ car at Irwindale in front of the D1 judges.   Funny – I can’t even remember what event this is!  The combination of me not remembering plus the picture shows barely any smoke tells me that I probably didn’t do very well.  But it’s still nice to see new pictures from the past!

From one of my early day touge drifting sessions. I was so into getting my front tire into that rain gutter. My favorite part of this picture was the flowers in front of my bumper.  Read one of my old posts about drifting at touge.

This is from Drift Day 9… LAS VEGAS! I drove my car there in the hellish heat with no a/c. We all remember that drive as one of the worst drives we ever made in our cars.  Read my blog post about the vegas drift event.

Drift Day 11 at Irwindale. This was my favorite look for my car... standard front silvia bumper with oem side skirts, oem rear unders and wangan spoiler. I liked my stickers like that as well.

Another shot from Drift Day 11. My lovely concave face TE37s in the front :)

Shot my speedo at Streets of Willow. Drifting at 55mph was a big deal for me back then! Fuel gauge not working. Ghetto!

12.02.2003 – Riding Shotgun with Team Orange + Drift Showoff 3 @ Irwindale

I forgot about some of those details… I’m glad I’ve managed to keep this blog alive for so many years.

I guess side brake entry is required for a course layout like this… I just hate to see it if it isn’t for the purpose of going ass-backwards into the corner.

And has anybody else notice how many of the cars out there have ~800hp?! What a testament to Japanese tuners! How do they keep from contantly overheating? Breaking axles, transmissions and clutches? Oh yeah and blowing engines? Not that I feel that competitive drifting requires 800hp, but how the heck do you campaign such a setup and make it reliable?? America, we are doing it wrong!

Some various notes I’d like to mention:

• Okamura is CRAZY in that car. I’ve never seen such an old dude adapt so well (and quickly) to drifting. He rocks it so hard in this video.
• Drift Samurai gets into 6th gear?!
• I do not enjoy watching that huge Crown drift.
• Naoto Suenaga is always driving one of Kumakubo’s many hand me down cars and it’s so confusing
• Yamashita in the Weld Mark II!
• Shinji Minowa is awesome for putting Hey Man so huge on the side of his car

Although I look at my car these days and think that it looks really cool, it’s still not my favorite era of my car. It was my favorite back in 2003 when I got my tapered face TE37s and I had stickers going from the rear part of the door and up the rear fender.

I’m being honest when I say that I really don’t see any sileighties that look good to me.  Back in the days of 1998 I did, but I never really liked any others… besides mine.  I think the silvia face just really does not match a hatchback s13 or something.  But for some reason I still think mine looked cool and I can’t really come up with a reason why.  Is it because it’s black?  Maybe it’s that combined with the zenki lip and wangan wing?  Maybe it’s just because it’s mine and I’m being nostalgic.  I’m not sure!  All I know is that I could spend hours on end looking at my car in the driveway and I still feel the same way when I see these old pics.

Here’s some pics of what my car looked like during my favorite stage.  Maybe with my r32 wheels in the rear instead of those 5zigens.

Time keeps passing and the 240sx keeps getting older, which means the beloved SR20DET is also getting older and will eventually be pretty hard to come by.  I think you’ll eventually see the 240sx die out at drift events… but probably not as much as the AE86 has.  Drifting may die out too, but I think the 240sx’s popularity would die out before drifting would.

So what’s going to replace the 240sx?  The 350Z and G35 since they’ve been in production for almost 10 years from now and I think it’s pretty safe to say they are starting to become pretty affordable to buy as a dedicated track car.  Oh, and not to mention the obvious – these cars have huge aftermarket support.

Every once in a while, I’ll see a car and think to myself – I wonder what that would be like as a drift car.  I think a lot of people are starting to think that way… Now I see people buying Mustangs, Lexus GS300s, Cressidas, IS300s, etc.  I think we can also thank Formula D teams for showing us that it’s possible to drift almost anything (although maybe not always successfully at that level of competition).

I decided to compile a list of cars that I often wonder about as an alternative to the 240sx.  What do you think?

• Cadillac CTS-V – Would definitely be fun to drive.  I was also going to say these things are ugly and what’s the point… but then I found the image below.  Looks good to me!!  But expensive…
  
• Subaru Impreza STI – I think this car has a lot going for it… it looks good, it’s got a lot of aftermarket support, and it’s got proven engine.  Plus it’s a hatch, so you can fit plenty of spare tires in the trunk.  The problem (I’ve heard) is the suspension is setup for AWD, so there is no self steering as you’d find in a car based on the FR platform.
  
• Infiniti G35 Sedan (V36) – Engine is a blast, I can see it looking good, and I know that it drifts well, but expensive as well.
  
• Lincoln LS – I know that they  come with a V8.  But they also look like a yacht.
  
• BMW M3 (E30) – These cars are so gorgeous!  I just can’t see myself destroying one on the track!
  
• BMW M3 sedan (E36) – The reason I picked this is because I think we need to see more 4 doors drifting.
  
• Nissan 300ZX (Z32) – Street legal turbo v6… why aren’t more people doing it?
  
• Acura NSX – Just because I think the engine makes a great sound and it would look crazy doing some skidding.
  
• Hyundai Genesis – This is a pretty boring selection, but I think it has a lot of potential to become really popular in drifting.
  

Did You Know…

that my SSR MKIII were sold to me by one of the dudes in Night Zone?

My buddy Ogawara Ken was in contact with them and made the deal happen.

My car with SSR MK-III in the rear and MK-II in the front

Team Night Zone

Turns out Steve Demmitt was featured in a Digital Photographer magazine and he proudly presents that infamous photo of Nadine!  

Source: Steve Demmitt’s Blog

map

So many memories on this road.

On a side note, you can actually double click on the map and see street view. Nice!

I was for certain I would be on the “who’s not” list, but he didn’t really have that. But being at the bottom of the list with 0 points since 2003 pretty much sums it up! NICE!

Article was written more recently than I thought – in October 2008.

Ladies, I still got it. Holla!

Tell your momma!

Since working on the drift cars the other weekend and picking up some Neovas for my new SSR wheels, I started to think about my car a lot. It started to rain last week, and after some “street testing” in my G35, I started to think about drifting a lot – so much so that I mounted my tires and changed my wheels in the rain on Saturday. I went and did some “driving” real quick. I can’t get it out of my head now… I just want to install all these parts I’ve had sitting around in my garage and I want to go driving again! I’ve been having dreams every night about drifting, my new wheels, etc. Here’s a funny thing I just noticed – my drifting dreams are NEVER at the track. Why is that??

or

Got any resolutions for 2009? I’ve never made any new year resolutions, mostly because I’m a firm believer in always trying to become a better person. BUT if I had to choose one, I guess I would say to be a better father. Kristy is really teaching me so much about what it means to be a father and I think it’s probably the most difficult thing a man can do. Being a father takes some serious effort – as in life changing effort! She is definitely opening my eyes constantly and making me realize that being a father is less about setting ground rules and being a firm dictator, but more about empathy and guidance. I sound old!

Speaking of old… look at how old this blog is!! If you count the time when I was blogging before I made sileightymania.com, I think this blog would be 10 years old. If not, then this entry marks the start of it’s 9th year. Are you kidding me??? Where has all the time gone?

Here’s a video of me drifting in the “Drift Invite” competition. Nadine was nice enough to let me drive her car for the competition, because my car didn’t have a cage and she wanted me to compete since I hadn’t for such a long time. This is the Top 4 round vs Calvin Wan, since I beat Tommy Suell in the Top 16 round and then Stephan Papadakis in the Top 8 round.

In the video, you’ll see that we had a one more time run, where something happened and Calvin spun in front of me. It was such a simple section of the track that I felt okay with blinking once I passed the clipping cone – bad mistake. When I opened my eyes, Calvin’s door was right in front of me and I slammed into him with my throttle to the ground. At that moment, I thought about when I was chasing him the round earlier, he seemed a bit weird in that section of the course…

I felt so bad afterwards that I didn’t even want to try and fix the car to go back on the track. Calvin fixed his car and won the round by default, but then he went on and beat Tanner Foust to get 1st place. He was really nice and gave Nadine and I some of his winnings to fix our car even though he didn’t have to.

And that, boys and girls, is the story of why Nadine has an S15 face on her car. Because I had to fix her car afterwards! This was also my only real crash while drifting.