Browse by Tags
Posted
Oct 25 2008, 03:47 AM
by
Mike Garrett
with 12 comment(s)
As I'm writing this it's about 7pm here in Gotemba city Japan and I just returned to the hotel from the first half of this weekend's D1GP season finale at Fuji Speedway. This was actually my first trip to Fuji Speedway and it is an amazing circuit. Probably the most scenic I have ever been to, but I'll be talking about that in another post.There was heavy rain during yesterday's practice sessions, but fortunately today was dry.My stomach is growling like crazy, but before we head out and enjoy some yakiniku, I wanted to post up a few quick shots from today's qualifying and practice....
More >>>
Posted
Oct 07 2008, 04:19 AM
by
Jeroen Willemsen
with 7 comment(s)
When I was looking for some photo's of The Athens Tuning Show I came across a topic on the Driftworks forum, one of the posters there posted a nice collection of photo's of the event. The Athens Tuning Show is the biggest car event in Greece, it's a mix between new cars from manufacturers and tuners from Europe. Together with the indoor show they also have a action arena outside where you can see drifters and some other special acts. This year, same as last year, Team Orange made an appearance...
More >>>
Posted
Sep 19 2008, 09:00 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 24 comment(s)
On my first day back at the office after our epic Speedhunting trip in Europe and Japan, I rushed straight over to meet with our editor Riley, to hand him a hard drive full of amazing imagery from Ebisu, Leipzig, Honjyo, Spa and Suzuka.... But our first order of business was to edit this video piece: Team Orange Triple drifting on the famous Ebisu Circuit in Japan! I have to say it was quite something else to have the world's most famous drift team performing their triple action drifting, all...
More >>>
Posted
Sep 08 2008, 01:20 PM
by
Naoto Suenaga
with 7 comment(s)
Hey everyone! Naoto Suenaga from Team Orange here with another blog entry. For this post I want to talk about D1 Street Legal Rd.4 which was held on August 30th at the Ebisu Circuit South Course. As you saw in Antonio's post, I won the event, and I would like to thank everyone for the nice comments! Thanks to all of my supporters, sponsors, and fans I have won three out of the four D1SL events so far this season and I really appreciate all of the support!...
More >>>
Posted
Sep 01 2008, 05:24 PM
by
Antonio Alvendia
with 10 comment(s)
I'm rushing off to the airport right now, I'll regretfully be heading back to the USA later this afternoon. At least it won't be too bad, I just found out that my good friend Toshiki Yoshioka will be going to LA today as well, so I'm going to try to meet up with him at the airport, as well as some former D1 umbrella girl friends of mine, who are heading to LA as well. However, I didn't want to leave Japan without posting up a short story with photos from this weekend's D1GP...
More >>>
Posted
Aug 15 2008, 10:09 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 12 comment(s)
I'm realizing that the rhythm of life in this small Japanese town of Nihonmatsu is quite a lot slower than I'm accustomed to. I seem to be permanently hardwired to a high speed pace: go, go, go - at all times! It's that or I am the most impatient person in the world.... or I have the attention span of a three year old.... or probably all of the above. I seem to have something inside of me that needs to keep pushing forward at all times. Call it drive or ambition, I don't know, all...
More >>>
Posted
Aug 13 2008, 04:43 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 4 comment(s)
“You are next”, said Antonio to me. Immediately the butterflies started. We had set our video and photo cameras up next to a section of the infamous Touge course at Ebisu Circuit and were watching Team Orange’s leader Kumakubo and fellow Speedhunter Naoto Suenaga doing ride-along tandem battles in their S13 demo/practice cars. Now I’ve played the Ebisu Touge course many times in Need for Speed Pro Street… and I tell you I’m totally lousy at it. I was one of the...
More >>>
Posted
Aug 13 2008, 03:00 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 10 comment(s)
Some of our long term readers will know that I'm a big fan of late '70s/early '80s Group 5 and IMSA GTX cars. These are some of the most extreme production based cars that ever raced and for me their crazy bodywork and massive power really sparks the imagination. They are one of the main reasons I'm such a car nut these days. A few months ago, we ran a feature on Group 5 cars at Le Mans and some Speedhunters readers pointed out that the famous Japanese tuning house, Jun ran an RX7...
More >>>
Posted
Aug 12 2008, 05:26 AM
by
Mike Garrett
with 3 comment(s)
While the world may be watching the Beijing Olympics right now, thanks to Speedhunter Naoto Suenaga we got our own take on China with his recent post chronicling Team Orange's trip to Shanghai for some drift action.. As a follow up to Naoto's post ,we now have some video of the Toyota REIZ drift show performed by Suenaga and the rest of his teammates. The video can be found on the official Toyota REIZ site, and even though you may not be able to read or understand Chinese, the video is certainly...
More >>>
Posted
Aug 08 2008, 02:14 PM
by
Naoto Suenaga
with 7 comment(s)
Hello everyone, Naoto Suenaga from Team Orange here again. For this post I will be talking about my June trip to Shanghai, China for a drift event at Shanghai Tenmayama Circuit. Toyota of China held the event to promote the Toyota REIZ, which is called the Mark X in Japan. For the drift show, all four Team Orange drivers made the trip from Japan including Kumakubo, Tanaka, myself, and Hiraoka. We were also joined by two Chinese drivers to make a total of six. The cars that we used were left hand...
More >>>
Posted
Aug 06 2008, 02:19 AM
by
Rod Chong
with 11 comment(s)
New video from Stephane and co at Clash Production. Nice work guys!
:R
More >>>
Posted
Jul 24 2008, 05:00 PM
by
Mike Garrett
with 10 comment(s)
It's time to finish up our week-long look at the cars of the various international drift series as we examine some of the cars from the European Drift Championship. Before working on Speedhunters, I had only a vague knowledge of the EDC, but I have been learning more and more about the series and its cars over the past few months and have been quite impressed with what I have seen. While you won't find quite the variety of cars that you see in the US Formula D series, the EDC has plenty of top quality cars and they seem to be getting better and better......
More >>>
Posted
Jul 21 2008, 12:00 PM
by
Mike Garrett
with 19 comment(s)
Over the course of this week will be doing a number of articles that showcase the cars of some of the various drift series around the world. It should give you a good idea of similarities and differences between some of the different series as well as some of the different takes on car builds. We will be showing both grassroots and pro level cars and we thought the Japanese D1GP series would be a great place to start......
More >>>
Posted
Jul 14 2008, 04:32 AM
by
Mike Garrett
with 5 comment(s)
This weekend it was EDC time again as Europe's best drifters headed to Santa Pod Raceway in England for the fourth round of this year's series. Besides the all of the EDC regulars, the roster also included Team Orange's Nobushige Kumakubo and Kazuhiro Tanaka making an appearance in their second round of EDC competition after an impressive performance last month at Silverstone. In addition, this round also saw Adam Richardson, the former champion of the D1 New Zealand series making his EDC debut in his A31 Nissan Cefiro. The makeshift course at Santa Pod makes for an interesting contrast to some of the more traditional circuits that are seen on the EDC schedule and throughout the event there would be some very exciting action with the competitor's cars getting extremely close to each other during the tandem matches. Of course the event would not be without its casualties either, as you saw by Rod's post about Paz's AE86......
More >>>
Posted
Jul 10 2008, 09:17 PM
by
Rod Chong
with 5 comment(s)
This weekend will mark Team Orange's second visit to the European Drift Championship. This time around they'll be taking on some night drifting at Santa Pod. I'm sure they'll be very hungry to take the spoils this weekend!
For now let's look back at the drama that was their visit to Silverstone last month. Big props to our friends at Clash Production for this fine piece of video work.
:Rod Chong
EDC Silverstone Report
Clash Production
More >>>
Posted
Jun 27 2008, 10:02 AM
by
Antonio Alvendia
with 4 comment(s)
You may be wondering why there's an AE86 behind Yoshioka in this photo, rather than a red SC430. I took this photo of Yoshioka at Suzuka Circuit last year. But check this out - I just got the most random, but funny phone call right now. It's the middle of the night right now, and for some reason, my phone was ringing. Just as I was getting up to answer it, I'm thinking, "dang, I hope it's a hot chick calling" but sigh... no such luck. On the other end of the line, I hear...
More >>>
Posted
Jun 27 2008, 06:10 AM
by
Antonio Alvendia
with 5 comment(s)
So today I've been thinking about Japan and Hawaii... and as I was looking through some of my photos, I found this cool pic of my friend Hirotaka Hoshino greeting the drifting fans after his performance at Big X at Ebisu West Course. Hoshino owns a custom paint and body shop in Gunma Japan called Hoshino Car Style, and is the leader of a Gunma-based drift team called Geki Kassou Dan . Geki , which means "strong" is a very popular group of young drifters who have a "cool guy"...
More >>>
Posted
Jun 10 2008, 05:00 PM
by
Mike Garrett
with 24 comment(s)
Fans who attended the D1GP Tokyo Drift exhibition match over the weekend were treated to much much more than just your standard D1 drift competition. Given the event's high profile locale and the desire to make sure ticket buyers got their money's worth, event organizers saw to adding several demo runs and performances that were held over the course of the weekend......
More >>>
Posted
Jun 06 2008, 10:45 AM
by
Naoto Suenaga
with 13 comment(s)
Hello again everyone, it's Naoto Suenaga from Team Orange. For this post, I'd like to talk about the Ebisu Spring Drift Matsuri (festival) that was held this May at my workplace, Ebisu Ciruit. I will also describe a little about the different courses at Ebisu. The big Drift Matsuri events are held at Ebisu three times each year with one in the spring, summer, and fall. Normally, the east and west courses at Ebisu are not used for drifting, but for two whole days during the Drift Matsuri ALL...
More >>>
Posted
Jun 05 2008, 05:24 AM
by
Mike Garrett
with 10 comment(s)
If you haven't yet heard , last weekend's EDC round at Silverstone went down with all the excitement you would expect from a match-up featuring top drivers from both Europe and Japan battling against the backdrop of a legendary racing circuit. Nobushige Kumakubo and Kazuhiro Tanaka from Team Orange put up a strong showing in their first EDC event and Phil Morrison gave an awesome performance in his new S15, but in the end it was Brett Castle in his trusty S14 who defeated the "tsuiso...
More >>>