Hit and Run DC – Winter Vicdrift Matsuri – Winton Raceway

 

Photos: Jack Geraghty (jakg.tumblr.com/) and Scott Mitchell (www.facebook.com/ScottMitchellMedia)

What’s up guys, Jack here from HnR – dropping in to give you guys the low down on our recent trip down to Victoria for the Winter Drift Matsuri at Winton Raceway. Our boys Scott Mitchell and Jack Geraghty (not me) were nice enough to snap these shots along the way, so I can use them to tell a kind of story.

We’re based on the north side of Sydney, so the trip down south takes the better part of eight and a half hours. We jumped the freeway at sunrise from our houses and met up on the freeway just outside of town. Tired eyes all round, but everyone’s super excited.

The trip isn’t as bad as it might sound. Eight hours is nothing when you live for it. Winton is a good track, and the event is run by great people. and being a “Matsuri” means this event will include two full days of on-track nonsense.

Stopping along the way is always fun, we try to check the rigs and make sure nothing is about to fall off, but usually we’re all pretty happy just to hang out for a few minutes.

We met up with these other Sydneysiders during a much needed break. The black 180 had a single cam turbo RB30 swapped in, which we all thought was pretty cool.

Woods’ Skyline was one of the cars we dragged along with us. It’s a light tune car, making around 200hp. We run Falken 615ks up the front so that he can really throw the chassis around, with ZE912s on the rear. Driving a basic but well set up drift car like this is some of the most fun you’ll ever have.

Scott Mitchell is our media dude. We grew up with him local, he used to shoot at the pub we’d all hang at on a Thursday. Nowadays we’d be lost without him, we think.

It’s pretty normal for us to go to an event without only a handful of cars, but a heap of people. We always try to go along and help each other out as much as we can, even when our cars are really broken. The party is always a damn good time, too.

We managed to arrive at the event early enough that we could go through scruitineering the night before. This is essentially where a couple of the event officials go over each car and make sure they’re not going to catch on fire.

Remember how I was telling you about Woods’ Skyline a little further up the page, and how basic yet fun it was? Ryan’s 180 is the other end of the stick. It’s a full-tune car – all adjustable suspension, a weld-in roll cage, and the engine has been swapped out for a 500hp 2jz. It’s pretty scary, but really fun.

Our cars are painted the same colour and have pretty similar suspension, but totally different engines. They both break a lot.

It was Ben’s first time trying out the RT615K up front. He swapped to a 17 inch rim so that he could keep the car low despite the chunky tyre, and we think it looks sweet with 18s still on the rear. The car had a tonne of front end grip – we’ll be putting 615Ks on the front of most of our cars shortly.

Matsuri roughly translates to ‘festival’ in Japanese. It’s a term they’ve been using to describe weekend-long drift events forever. It’s caught on here now too. They’re a cool event because they give you a chance to fix your car and get back out there if it breaks on day one. There’s also a lot of cool cars kicking around, like this RB30 E30.

Matsuri nights are really fun, trust me! But we probably can’t talk too much about that here.

The morning of the first day is spent doing final checks over the car and trying to shake off the blues from the night before (ha).

It can be sort of hard to get the cars started in the morning because it’s so damn cold, and because most of them run on E85. We’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve (mainly Ben), so it’s no big deal!

Once that’s all sorted it was time to hit the track and kill about 30x ZE912s. We won’t talk about the drifting just yet, Scott Mitchell’s video is right around the corner.

Until next time, cya!