After 3 weeks of long nights, coercing friends to help me by rewarding them with beer and pizza, the car got finished.

What got done:
Battle Version front tension rods with heim jointed lower control arm (Alex Pfeiffer)
Battle Version steering spacer with manual steering rack
Battle Version 50/50 4-link
Battle Version Alignment (Alex P again)
Hawk Blue racing pads, new brake master (Mark English)
Cusco RCA
New engine tune by SR Motorcars, thanks to Eric Rhee and Matt Perkins
New rear axle, bearing thanks to Blue Moon performance
New vinyl job, thanks to Matt Perkins and SR Motorcars (I'm sure Eric helped too)
New hatch paint job by R.Rabe body and paint

The car runs fantastic. Had it at auto-X and it was fine, but I'd really like to take it to a drift event. That will come soon.

Who wants to rent the balcony for a test day?

Ok so, I'm getting back into the swing of things. I haven't posted in soooo long, partially because the car has been down. But now its back, and in a big way. New transmission, new suspension parts, and new vinyl on the way. I'm going to begin updating this with everything I've done since two years ago, so for the 3 of you who are still reading this, there are a lot of updates coming!

Food Truck Meet

The new hot trendy trend appears to be food trucks. The idea is to sample new, tasty cuisine without the stuffy restraunt environment. Lately, some organizers have gotten together to combine the fanboy antics of import car meets with the fat kid antics of greasy food-off-trucks to make the latest craze in what to do on weeknights, the food truck meet.

Looks pretty tasty doesn't it? Well, you're going to have to wait in line.....

But if you're lucky, you run into old friends, like drifting Kat!

What my living room table usually looks like.

Cars and Coffee

Ok, so its been over a year since I've posted. A lot has happed since then, some good, some bad, and some life changing. One of those things is my addiction to Call of Duty but that's an entirely different story. Anyhow for years, I've been wanting to attend "Cars and Coffee" but could never drag myself out of bed early enough to do so. I finally was able to drag myself out of bed, and met up with Johny Mac to check this local favorite out. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun. I'll try to keep my photos of a slightly different variety, as people tend to post the same cars over and over again. Hopefully, my eye for car flavor isn't the norm.

Oh, and thanks to May I got a new camera for my birthday!

Mini. Very mini. the owner literally brought exactly what he needed for the meet, and that's it. Mostly because nothing else will fit inside the trunk.

I keep telling myself that someday, I'll own a 911. When I see fine examples like this 70's Carrera, I feel that day can't come soon enough. The hue of green, the classic lines, oh how have I survived without one?

I'm sure you've all seen Viper ACR's. Yes they're badass. Yes they have over 600 horsepower. What's more interesting is this cool sticker the owner had on the rear wing.

In my fantasy garage, I'm a private investigator. I've got a moustache. I've got an endless collection of Hawaiian shirts, and I basically cruise Hawaii all day chasin' tail and solving crimes. The last accessory needed for this lifestyle is the 308 GTS above.

I'm sure you see E46 M3's every day, but very few have the nice wheel fittment and heigh as this one.

Aother classic Carrerra, AC Cobra (kit car?) and an S2000. Such a nice variety.

I leave you with one of the nices restored interiors I saw that day.This was from inside a 1969 Shelby Cobra GT500, signed by the man himself. I guess I should have had Keiichi sign my dash when D1 still came here. Maybe next time!

My Helmet

Anybody that knows me understands that I'm a total racing gear whore. I love the baller stuff. Once you start doing enough track days you reason to yourself that its worth it to buy really good stuff, but part of the appeal is that you've got something cool, you can show it off.

I had been rocking an open faced helmet for a few years, and it had served me well. It was a great gift from my sister for Christmas about five years ago, and I wore it through most of my early years in road race and open track events. Even did 2 rounds of 24 Hours of LeMons in it! I was starting to want a closed face helmet to use at drift events since debris would always get in my eyes. I still use the open faced one for hot days, but decided to invest in something high quality and of a closed face design. Shortly there after, I purchased a Bell K1 Sport.

Ever since I became interested in world motor sports, I've been fascinated with driver's custom suits and helmets. I've always wanted something to help put me apart from the rest (how many G-Force white helmets do you see at the track?) and also something that was custom. I like to integrate styling from different car cultures, and often times look to things far from drifting and typical racing to get inspiration. I started looking around and ended up viewing some hot rod photos with pinstriping. The only helmets I saw were for bikers, and were essentially small, skull cap type helmets. This is when I decided that I wanted a pinstripe job as well as some sort of hot-rod influence on my motor sport helmet.

After lots of internet research, I found a sample photo of exactly what I wanted. That sample photo came from Sam Boeger's website, www.bogies.biz. She's an amazingly talented artist, and also in California. Check out her pinstriping photos to see what photo I'm talking about! Anyhow after a few emails back and fourth with a rough outline of what I was looking for, I had shipped the helmet to her and she began work. What you see is the finished product:

As you can see here, there's a fully detailed pinstriping job running over the top of the helmet with a pretty aggressive design.


After I saw it on her website, I knew I had to have this chick on my helmet. Part of its appeal to me is the hot-rod style, and also another influence came from drag racing. Drag-racing guys love to have chicks on their helmets. Its difficult to see, but the "tramp stamp" on her back says "The big Korean". Yeah, that's me.

You'll also notice the name near the front chin area. That's just straight up from racing. If you've got a custom helmet, its got to have your name on it somehow!

I also loved the color combination she used to achieve a sort of neon effect. It constrats nicely with a dark helmet. Now I've got to just get my iriduim visor and I'm done!

Anyhow come say "hi" sometime at a track event if you'd like to take a look at it. I highly recommend Sam's work to any of you out there looking for custom work on, well, just about anything! She does more than just pinstripe too, if you wanted something else done. Anyhow, I hope more of you start doing custom cool stuff too!

Reflection

So, 2009 is coming to a close. I wanted to take the time to reflect on a few things that happened through the year. For me, this year was pretty big in terms of my growth as an automotive enthusiast but more specifically, as a driver.

After spending the past 2-3 years concentrating solely on grip driving, I decided to embark on drifting a lot more about a year ago. I think I only did about 2 grip events this year, while all the rest were drifting events (easily 10 or more in total). I think I got a lot better throughout the year, thanks to help from people like Filipino Alex, Hawaiian Alex, Andy, Johnny Mac, Wes and of course Taka. With their confidence inspiring words (minus the Hawaiian, because he always tells me Corollas are "ghey" and I should buy a Z) I actually entered my first drifting competition. As you read in one of my older blogs I didn't do too well, but it certainly was a growing and learning experience for me. So much so that in my 2nd competition ever (at Primm) I placed 4th, which out of a field of about 10-12 driver's isn't too bad at all.

I also had a realization this year that I've never had before: I don't really need any more parts for my car right now. My car is pretty well built with the most tested and reliable parts in racing, and I have the best people in the industry to help me when I need it. My money hasn't been going towards specific parts, but only when things are in need of repair. With the money saved there, I can put it towards tires and events, which I did.

I finally got a tow vehicle, so I'm no longer so fatigued before and after events from driving a super loud, punishing, and super illegal vehicle. Towing is the bees knees for sure.

I also started realizing how lucky I am to have the above people to help me out. From reading Club4ag on a regular basis, I get frustrated with how the most unrespected, most unreliable people are giving the newbs information and opinions, and probably shaping their thoughts and beliefs. That's truly unfortunate, so I'm fortunate to have such well seasoned and educated friends help me on my journey. Not everybody has professional racing drivers, mechanics, fabricators and lunatics to shape their outlook and opinions on things (the lunatic is again, the Hawaiian).

So all in all, a pretty good 2009. I want a better showing in the next all AE86 drift comp that will hopefully happen next year, and I hope to break 1:30 at SOW too!

Hotties in NASCAR?

Ooohhhhweee its been a while since I updated this thing. The 4AG time attack was a few weeks ago, but beyond that, there hasn't really been anything automotive related going on with me. I've chosen to spend my time in another way, which has been quite awsome!

Anyhow, onto this week's big big story. Danica has finally signed with NASCAR. She'll be competing with Dale Earnhardt Jr's company, but will start in a lower league in order to earn her license to run with the big boys. There's a lot of controversy as to whether or not she'll be competative, and whether or not its a good career move. She's earing a pretty good salary and is relatively competative in INDY, but looking at other INDY driver's histories (whom have been better than her) you'll notice that none of them have done well. As a matter of fact, the only open wheel racer who has started to climb the ranks is Juan Pablo Montoya, but I consider him to be a different class of driver since he'd done Formula 1. Anyhow there's no doubt that Danica will continue to hog the limelight and plenty of redneck fanboys will think she's cute, but how well will it be recieved to have such a high profile female driver in NASCAR? I'm sure there's other women in NASCAR at the moment, but I don't and chanes are that you don't know who they are. Two things are certain, however. 1, Danica has some twangy redneck music now on her website (http://www.danicaracing.com0/ and 2, I will watch maybe 1 full lower league NASCAR race this year, just to see how she's doing.