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Posted
Nov 06 2009, 06:25 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 7 comment(s)
Those of you who are "friends" with me on Facebook will know that last week Speedhunter's editor Riley Vigier and I were crunching to finishing up two videos for the 2009 SEMA Show. You've already seen our tribute to the new Formula D champion Chris Forsberg, and here's our second year end video offering: Falkenhunting 2009. A new Speedhunters film which debuted at Falken's SEMA booth on Tuesday. It covers our season long collaboration with the Team Falken drift family....
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Posted
Nov 02 2009, 03:20 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 112 comment(s)
VIP Style... Drift Style... Hella Flush (?) style... Lux Style... Time Attack Style... JDM Style... These are all different labels which have been thrown around the US import car scene in the past few years. Once a style gets solidified, a rule set gets made and standards are created for what one should and shouldn't do with a car build. However, every once and a while a car will come up which makes you scratch your head. This 2006 Nissan 350Z is certainly Hella Flush approved, but it's clean...
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Posted
Nov 02 2009, 10:24 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 82 comment(s)
"Offset is everything" : This is a mantra which many of you guys have been preaching for some time now... But I want to question if wheel offset is indeed the be-all-end-all of modified cars aesthetics around the world. For me cars with offset wheels are usually great, but it's a rule that doesn't always apply to all cars across multiple styles and genres. So let me put this alternative idea forward: Stance is Everything. How the car sits on its wheels -the stance, is the one element...
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Posted
Oct 30 2009, 03:32 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 10 comment(s)
This Speedhunters film is going to be my final contribution to the Driver's Month special features.
It's a quick portrait of the multiple World Touring Car Champion, Andy Priaulx.
Shot last month at the Imola round of the WTTC, we've done our best to capture the essence of Touring Car racing. The intensity, the aggressive driving and the on track dramatics.
Thanks Andy Priaulx for taking the time to talk to us. Enjoy the film!
...
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Posted
Oct 28 2009, 08:10 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 60 comment(s)
Wow what a response we are getting to our Access Zero 42 coverage! Glad you lot like the photos, but the true testament has to go to the organizers of the show who brought a lot of fellow auto enthusiasts together for this meet. Linhbergh and I decided we were going to select 1 car from the event to shoot as the November "Slammed" theme calendar desktop. It needed to be a car that we hadn't already shot as photo features, and one that we weren't already aware of. I wasn't sure...
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Posted
Oct 27 2009, 01:20 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 78 comment(s)
We're in a bit of a video post production crunch right now as we have two videos to get completed in the next couple of days. They are going to be debuting next week at SEMA so we're putting a bit of pressure on ourselves to make these new films the hottest things ever. I'm having a bit of difficulty concentrating on writing right now to give you a review of the adventure that Linhbergh and I had in Houston this past weekend, but the site has been a bit empty this morning so let's try and get something written up here!...
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Posted
Oct 23 2009, 05:45 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 144 comment(s)
I'm currently sitting in the lounge area at the Planet Zero Anime center in Houston, Texas overseeing a room filled with JDM import arcade machines. The sun is going down and I'm working away on updating the Speedhunters website while Linhbergh is out shooting two amazing super-slammed Nissans. We've come here to shoot a raff of dropped cars in preparation for November's "Slammed" theme and Texas seems to be one of the best places to source this style of car. We're also...
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Posted
Oct 23 2009, 12:30 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 13 comment(s)
I'll finish up blogging about my recent trip to California with a quick story about the journey from the hotel to the airport this past Monday. The plan was to drop off the NFS Terlingua off at Shelby's LA HQ and take a cab to LAX, but this isn't exactly how things turned out. So here we are parking up the Mustang for another sad good bye. The giant SUV belongs to everyone's favourite Scion stalwart, Chris Rado. Some of you may remember we featured this supercharged 600 hp truck exactly...
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Posted
Oct 22 2009, 10:20 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 11 comment(s)
I suppose some people might call me a bit of a workaholic as I very rarely stop working. This past weekend though I had a little too much on my plate. I had two camera operators shooting 2 different drift films, was collaborating with our team of Speedhunters photographers, was helping to organize the Royal Purple video game contest and was also following five different drifters around for their Speedhunters guest blogs. Ack!... So the weekend was perhaps a bit pressurized for my own taste, but that’s...
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Posted
Oct 21 2009, 10:10 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 23 comment(s)
Conventional wisdom says that time starts to slow down as you get older, but for me I'd say the opposite is true. Each year seems to be more action packed and high paced than the last. Exactly one week ago I was getting ready to fly from Vancouver to Los Angeles to attend the Formula D finals at Irwindale Speedway... but tonight I'm already getting set to fly to Houston, Texas tomorrow for two days of shooting the state's finest slammed cars. But before I get too far ahead of myself,...
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Posted
Oct 10 2009, 11:27 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 39 comment(s)
While we were in Imola as guests of the BMW WTCC team last month, we shot a film about former multiple Touring Car World Champion, Andy Priaulx which we'll be releasing shortly. He's also been writing a guest blog for Speedhunters about his twin BMW racing weekends at Imola and Road Atlanta, but right now he's in Australia racing at the Bathurst 1000 kms.
It's one of these marque international events that we'll need to Speedhunt one of these years. In the meantime, here's a great vintage video from Bathurst showing the R32 "Godzilla" showing the competition how it's done!
:R
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Posted
Oct 09 2009, 03:30 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 3 comment(s)
Ok, let's pick up the story of Klaus Ludwig and see what he's been up to from 1984 until present. At the end of Part1 , his fortunes were starting to flat line just a little bit. Klaus had chosen to race for Zakspeed Ford racing team instead of Porsche a few years previously, and it was becoming apparent that this perhaps was not the best long term decision for a 1980s sports car driver. As the Group C and IMSA GTP eras entered their third year in '84, Porsche was the sports car to have...
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Posted
Oct 09 2009, 09:57 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 12 comment(s)
The overall record for the Nurburgring Nordeschleife was set on the 28th of May, 1983 by Stefan Bellof, while qualifying for the 1983 World Endurance Championship race. The time? An astonishing 6:11.13 set in the then-new Porsche 956 Group C racer. This was the last year that the big prototypes raced on the Green Hell, for '84 they moved over to the new GP circuit.
That very same weekend, Derek Bell did some in-car shooting for a new video called "In Car 956", so we can get a little taste of what the Bellof time looked like. Have a look, the speeds are quite scary....
Enjoy!
:Rod
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Posted
Oct 08 2009, 03:16 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 34 comment(s)
I'm sure that most people who live in and around Germany don't necessary think of the Autobahn as a Temple of Speed. It's just a highway system that interconnects German cities. But for people who live further afield, a chance to drive flat out on the world's only unrestricted freeways sounds like an impossible fantasy. And having recently spent a day driving on these famous roads, I thought I'd commit a few of these experiences to paper (as it were) before the experience completely...
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Posted
Oct 08 2009, 10:12 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 10 comment(s)
As I look back into some of my favourite bits of motorsports history, one name keeps cropping up over and over again: Klaus Ludwig. I'm not necessarily a big fan of the man himself, but I have an immense amount of respect for what he's achieved over the course of his long and varied career. Some race drivers fade away after a decade or so of active racing, but not Klaus Ludwig. He's made car racing a lifelong habit... and all the power to him for doing so! As I've put this gallery...
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Posted
Oct 02 2009, 10:21 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 24 comment(s)
Sometimes the monthly Speedhunters themes have a very narrow focus and the site becomes becomes flooded with stories about single subject matter. This does work well if the theme is a broad subject matter which can be sliced and diced in multiple ways. However for October, we're going to go with a lightly applied theme, to allow the site to breathe a bit. From what I can tell, you guys enjoyed BMW month, but we now need to relax with themed stories for a while. So for October, we thought it would...
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Posted
Sep 30 2009, 12:00 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 18 comment(s)
I'm sure most of you guys are aware of the short but fruitful linkup between BMW and McLaren that produced the F1 Supercar, but this was not the first time these two companies worked together. Back in the 1970s McLaren had an American based racing team that was used for its Indianapolis campaigns. It was this team which BMW charged with running its IMSA Camel GT campaigns for the '77, '78 and '79 racing seasons. And this was the tool: the E21 BMW 320 Turbo IMSA racer. A car which...
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Posted
Sep 29 2009, 09:30 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 18 comment(s)
It's going to be several hours before the sun rises in Vancouver, Canada but I'm already up and am working away on my last few BMW feature stories. The first subject to check out is another bit of Munich based Speedhunting that Dino and I did in Germany last Wednesday. We took our two BMW press cars and drove south from Munich for around 100 kms on the world famous Autobahn freeways. This journey is a story unto itself, but I'll let Dino talk about that in a separate post. I'll just...
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Posted
Sep 26 2009, 04:00 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 9 comment(s)
Amongst the Speedhunters on site at the Petit Le Mans, I've been designated the press room worker. So while John Brooks and Linhbergh were off shooting the race, I've been sitting here watching the Speed TV feed and listening to Radio Le Mans. Out the window I can see one corner of the track, but I might as well be in my living room as I'm mostly getting a sense of the race through media, rather than direct experience. Not that I'm complaining! The weather has been pretty rubbish...
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Posted
Sep 23 2009, 02:00 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 29 comment(s)
When we were planning out BMW month on Speedhunters, we just knew that we had to visit their home base in Munich, Germany. September just wouldn't be complete without it. If we are truly exploring the culture of BMW, then we have to plug right in to the source don't we? So we worked with our contacts at BMW to get permission to shoot at their two Munich public attractions, BMW Welt and the recently refurbished BMW Museum. A few people also mentioned to me BMW had a private collection of vintage...
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