Spotted this Datsun 510 in the Nissan carpark the other day.

Looks like it is under restoration but didn’t see the owner around.

Continuing on from the Motorkhana post, I went back out to the skidpan yesterday to take a couple more photos. It’s still not exactly what I’m after but getting closer.

The Sun was brighter than I am used to. I tried to play with colour balances in Photoshop, not sure if it is better than the original or not.

The sell almost everything a house hold could need. Food, Tools, clothes, even pets they are all available at this store.

Drinks are available in bulk, unfortunately not cold for the humid Japanese summer.

They had a nice selection of oils and fluids to stock up on for our time at Ebisu.

The other important item was the helmets. I did bring a helmet from Australia but Nic and Rohan decided to buy some in Japan.

Helmets from this shop were cheap.

The problem was with the availability of size.

This stylist helmet was the only one that fit Nic’s head.

Rohan scored a Scooter helmet with a visor.

We did grab a few other items from the store, a set of overalls (that we didn’t use), gloves, electrical tape, duct tape, a jack (which was lost in the collection of jack at PowerVehicles), and some other minor tools.

Last Sunday was the MG Car Clubs final motorkhana round of the year. As well as competing, I was trying to take some long exposure photos.

A majority of photos that turned out were very similar.

Looking back, the Motorkhana might have was too slow for these type of photos.

I did take some of these random photos.

The event was full and had the most MG’s I had seen at a Motorkhana.

Tyrie’s new toy, a Turbo Micra.

Reece once again, won the event.

Clinton will probably need some new tyres for his Wife’s RX8.

Craig pushing his daily Integra around the track, taking out the series win for the “Honda” Class.

Check back soon for a photo feature of Joe’s Roadster.

More photos are located on my photobucket album HERE

Opps, I completely forgot to post the rest of the photos from the Sunday of ADGP Round 1. It has been so long that the second round has already happened, with Luke Fink taking the win again!

The Sunday was when the Top 32 battles were run and where the crowds would be the biggest.

A lot of the competitors were still licking their wounds from yesterday. A number of teams worked through the night to have their cars ready.

A pit pass ensured you were close to the action. The rest of the crowd were stuck in a cage.

Some of the best battles in Aussie drifting were seen at this event. The use over use of outside clipping points enabled chase cars to close gaps.

Pickering’s Riverside S13 was immaculate at the start of the event.

Jim Turner from NSW was one of the teams working through the night, reparing damaged front end suspension components.

The judges were walking around giving feed back on drivers performance.

This was the shakedown event for Anthony Bilic’s S13. He placed 4th in Round 2 of ADGP in Queensland.

The only female competitor at ADGP, Kelly Wong from Adelaide drifting her Nissan Cefiro.

Anthony Cece was also battling hard, and in his typical style of tagging walls.

Luke Fink, winner of ADGP Round 1 and Round 2.

Aggess’ victory burnout was huge!

The boys from Adelaide were displaying some nice team drifting.

Shane Beresford qualified but was knocked out in Top 32. He was only one out of a handful of cars not to receive an damage from the track.

There are a couple more photos HERE on my photobucket album.

See you next time

One of the most difficult parts of writing an article for me is the first sentence. Now I have overcome that part we can move on to the story. Ben is a Canberra local who moved from Canada several years ago. He has already built one amazing S15 (which I hope to take photos of later) but would also like to be involved more with drifting. Instead of destroying the S15, he bought this 180 as his drift pig. Bought with a set of BC Coilovers, the car was drift worthy until the engine bearing let go a few weeks ago.

Instead of repairing the red SR20 engine, Ben found a deal of an S15 engine and driveline package. The package was unfortunately auto but did come with the funky S15 diff. So out came the 20 year old engine.

The engine was in amazing condition. I think it has less than 90,000 kilometers and it was clean.

The only bit of dirty grease was around the powersteering pump. Which could be from when it was removed from the donor car.

The heavy automatic transmission was happily but painfully removed from the SR. It took us a few minutes to find the inspection plate underneath the engine.

No evidence of leaks from the rear main seal. After a few attempts, we used the grease method to insert the input shaft bush.

With the engine out, the plan was to clean the engine bay… but then again it would get dirty anyways.

So in went the engine. Everything lined up nicely. The gearbox slotted in with a slight nudge from the engine side.

Ben fitted a front mount intercooler while I was away gathering tools and parts.

Luckily the CA18DET 180 intercooler kit fitted to a S15 engine.

The turbo elbow did also fit but will need some better fitting parts later.

The old accelerator cable was stretched and will most likely need to be replaced.

We also kept the S15 powersteering pump. From my experience, all Nissan pumps (without HICAS) appear to be the same between the RWD series (R31, S13, S14, S15), the only difference being the mounting parts.

Left is the S15 bracket, right is the S13.

Top is the S15 bracket, bottom is the s13.

With only a few small things to go, we had to stop due to a lack of parts/tools. Ben is still waiting for a AFM, and we also need to find a solution for the main wiring plug, as it was not supplied.

Looks like it was over a month ago, when I said I would post more pictures of this AE86, back in this Post. We met the brothers while we skidding at the Ebisu Kurukuru course in August. The younger brother recently sold his modified Nissan R33 Skyline, to purchase a Hachi just like his older brother.

This was the shake down drive for the car. I didn’t even realise it was supercharged while I was there.

Rims to suit the car. Kazunari Okuya, the younger brother, said the suspension still needed some work.

The interior was very good for it’s age. Normally you would see the dash falling to bits.

The spares, a pair of Hoshino’s.

Rust is a familiar sight on these cars.

Due to the climate and age of the car, it is not unusual to see this much rust. They do plan to repair as much of this as possible.

For a shake down the car was running very well. They moved onto other courses later on in the day.

Masayuki Okuya, the older brother, is very pleased with his brothers purchase.

Hopefully we will see them again next time, with both of their Hachi’s.

Continuing where I left off int he previous post, we spent our second day in Japan traveling to Nihonmatsu. But first we needed to make a quick stop at Ueno to pick up some SD cards, hard drive and tapes.

Street arcade next to BicCamera, a large electronics chain. The cost for items normally available in Australia were very similar. Other things that were “rare”, such as MiniDV Tapes, in Australia were cheaper.

Major Japanese train stations have massive escalators like these. There are several levels, each with it’s own different type of transport (subway, train, shopping center with taxi/bus stations, Shinkansen).

Stations are airconditioned but were still very hot.

I’m pretty sure this is a comic book.

Not sure about this one, but it’s not porn.

Lunch for the Shinkansen trip to Nihonmatsu. This is “Yakisoba pan”, roughly translated Fried Noodle Bread. It is very tasty.

Nic mentioned that Japan was a lot greener than he was expecting.

We stopped at Fukushima to transfer to a local train for the last leg of the trip. At least one of them looks like they are enjoying the trip.

PowerVehicles organised our accommodation at the Urban Hotel in Nihonmatsu. Very conveniently located next to the train station. They were also able to arrange a cheap hire car for us, this Nissan Cefiro. I think it was around 4,000-5,000 yen per day including insurance.

Hopefully this post doesn’t confuse you but were not going back to Japan already. I have had a few questions about our trip and thought I should try to cover it in more depth. Hopefully my memory serves me well, I’m sure someone will correct me if I write something incorrect. We left for Japan the day after World Time Attack Challenge (which reminds me, I need to go through those photos). We managed to get a day flight out of Sydney, leaving at 8am with a lay over in Singapore. This was the first time Nic and Rohan had travelled overseas.

The seat entertainment systems have improved. There are a lot more movies and TV shows available on Demand, as well as the usual games and news. I did notice the availability of a USB port, not sure if it worked and what data it could read.

As we were booking the flights online, we were prompted what time of meal we would like. We thought it would be funny if we requested the Bland meal for Rohan but it looked a lot better than the normal food.

Our Singapore stop was very short. We pretty much left the plane, walked to the gate and boarded the plane.

Nic was very excited about going to Japan.

Singapore airport is massive, the walk between gates took 30mins.

They also had these really wide open lobby’s.

Travelators made me smile

The flight from Singapore to Tokyo went smoothly. Rohan received his next bland meal, while Nic was mesmerized by the entertainment system. Because we landed late at night, the tropical climate had not hit us hard. We did remove our winter layers and moved onto our hotel.

After spending the night at the hotel, we moved onto Nihonmatsu. There is our previous post of the trip here Tadaima Nihonmatsu!

I did take a few more photos of that part of the trip from my mobile phone. I will post a small article about that tomorrow.

Wow, it’s already been two weeks since ADGP has been run and won. Round two is just one week away, with the final at Barabagelo soon after. For our international visitors to this site, Australian Drift Grand Prix or ADGP is Australia’s newest national drifting competition. There has been a lot of talk on Australian import forums about this event, it’s rules and the track layout. Promises were made for Japanese style flick entries, walls, Ebisu like track, no Boldger, door to door action that spectators could get close too.

Hopefully you have seen the post earlier of the track layout. The Friday was the first time most of the drivers were able to see the track. We heard rumors that a select few were even able to test the layout.

Saturday was a challenging day for most teams. Most drivers were hesitant of the narrow track and started drifting with slow shallow drifts.

As the day progressed, the drifting improved and a contrast in skill could be clearly seen.

It did appear that people who had driven the track previously, seemed to have an edge above the rest.

Some of the competitors turned up already boro spec.

A bad start to the day, this S15 had it’s bonnet fly up into the first “corner” or “default chicane” (organisors own words).

There were a lot of crashes at this event, the above being the worst and it wasn’t the driver that was hurt badly. The R32 had come unstuck after the chicane and smashed along the inside wall, finally coming to rest after hitting another concrete barrier. The car was a write off, but worse was the camera person taking photos from behind the barrier. They had their toes crush off when the concrete moved from the force of the crash. Photographers were then moved away from parts of the wall.

Shane Beresford traveled down from Sydney in his 326 Power styled S13.

Christian Pickering’s Riverside Silvia after a fresh coat of paint.

Tom Monkhouse was riding the wall like a boss.

I think I overheard the judges saying that he was sacrificing a little speed for the long wall scrape.

Another victim of the walls of the Thunderdome. Jim Turner from NSW also stacked it into a corner causing some mechanical damage.

Proximity! The outside clipping point did help chase cars to tuck up inside of the lead car.

Stephen Pembrey was in a borrowed R31 for this round. He is hoping his V6 Sprinter will be ready before the next round.

Turns out Boldger was at the event.

This Cressida was cool. It is powered by a 1JZ and looked so aggressive on the track. He unfortunately did not qualify and left early.

Here is something you won’t normally ever see drifting, a Ford ZL Fairlane. It is a boosted 4L straight six. I think he was having mechanical issues and didn’t see him on the track very much.

Another Aussie drift car, the Holden VZ SS Ute.

The spectators area, and not just the ordinary ones. This area is the VIP view stand at $15 per person extra. It was still some distance from the track, with pit lane diving the two.

The field of 70 odd competitors were cut down to a top 32. Most of the top 32 did deserve their spot but there were a couple that I wondered how they made it through. The track did seem a little too narrow from a specators point of view. The drift entry was not exciting to watch, everyone seemed to be waiting for people to crash into the wall.

Drivers were saying the track was fun but very dangerous for the cars.

Few more photos of the Saturday are here . Sunday photos will be uploaded soon.