The reason I was on a time crunch with the car was because I wanted to make an event at Thunder Hill called The Good Luck Leage (@goodluckleague) hosted by Lucky (@luckyakalaurante). I’m not entirely sure if it was a good idea to drive the car, let alone drift it two days out of paint but who cares – it’s a drift car right?
Typically, with any drift event I go to I’m a complete disaster filled with anxiety because I can’t afford to trailer so if anything goes wrong I’ll be both shit out of luck and probably even more broke than if I had rented a trailer. Since nobody hates me more than I hate myself, I love making my life harder than it should be so I always take the gamble of driving there, drifting, and driving home. Prior to this event I’ve always gone to Drift Central which is only 94 miles away – not too bad right? Well Thunder Hill, on the other hand, is damn near 230 miles away. Good Luck.
Needless to say, I didn’t get as lucky as I’d have liked. The day started off great, I loaded up the S14 and drove out with Sal (@sg14k) to go pick up my buddy Igor (@metallist). Despite the anxiety I was ready to show off my hard work at Thunder Hill! As we’re cruising north toward Oakland on the beautiful, poorly lit 880 highway at 5am in the slow lane, I notice a metal plate far too fucking late. Sheer panic inhibits my body as I swerve right narrowly missing safety. Unfortunately a protruding nut or bolt of some sort clipped my side skirt causing god knows what to start flapping and rattling violently. Conveniently we were right next to an off ramp so we used the park anywhere button and assessed the damage. At this time it is cold as fuck so my diamond cutters are in full effect and I can’t feel any portion of my exposed skin. Not entirely sure what was flapping around but I opened the door to remount the skirt properly and shut the door on my thumb to see if everything looked good. Thankfully the damage was on the underside in the wheel well area so the car still looked great, so from there Sal and I decided to get back on the ro- wait holy fuck my thumb is actually inside the door jamb. I didn’t feel it initially because I was too focused on the damage and it was cold as hell. If there’s any silver lining in this situation my nail was unaffected by the whole ordeal and since it’s so cold I didn’t feel it just yet. Anyway Sal and I get back on the road and we meet up with Ian (@longboi.wav) at a nearby gas station.
Surprisingly, these were the only issues I ran into throughout the course of the drive to Thunder Hill. We met up with Max (@themaxpowa) at Walnut Creek and it was smooth sailings from there!
Thunder Hill Big Pad is an absolute blast. This event was my first experience with third gear initiations and “tandems” (very loosely used since we weren’t very close with each other) with both Ian and Max. I assume my misery is the most entertaining point of this blog so this is for you, you fuckin’ bottom feeders : my shifter was quite literally squirting transmission fluid throughout my cabin and at one point it got stuck in second gear for whatever reason, somehow my dumbass managed to lose my car keys – you know, the keys for the car that I was drifting, the one that I needed to start the car to drift, yeah that one – for a whopping 20 minutes (they were under my jack somehow), OH and I hit a cone dead on at the top of second gear!
All in all it was an amazing day with tons of seat time, here are a few shots and a video! Shot by @seajae_ , @danielhasacamera, and @curryisadrink!
This was an initial run of the event, I have a really bad habit of only recording warm ups. Later in the day I initiated third through the sweeper and downshifted to second for the rest of the track – this allowed for wider transitions and faster runs which was much funner!
1997 Nissan 240sx 