Pics from DX2 (Team Orange and Signal)

so DX2 was last weekend.

Team Orange (Nobushige Kumakubo, Masatoshi Asamoto, Kazuhiro Tanaka) and Signal Auto (Atsushi Kuroi and Kazuya Bai, along with Kosuke Kida) came to Mosport, a track near Toronto, and put on a big show for us all.

team orange brought a 180SX, a Sileighty, and their infamous S13 pick-up truck, while Signal brought it's drift twins as well as it's 1000hp R34 GT-R Skyline. it did laps of the oval circuit, and was by far the best sounding automobile i have ever heard in person.

i was staff for this event, meaning that i got a pit-pass and could go wherever i wanted in the event. i had long conversations (be it broken english or through a translator) with all of the drivers, and hung out with the team orange guys for most of the day. Tanaka was telling me about his favourite foods, and Kumakubo told me about how the team feels about their APC sponsorship. Tanaka and i also tried to lure sea-gulls with Wendy's french fries. it didn't work. also having a pit pass meant we had the best view of the track. standing on the inner pit wall, the cars would literally swing their tails about a foot in front of you, showering you with a cloud of tiny rubber bits that clung to your clothes, your hair, and got in your teeth. then there was the time when i was standing against the inner pit wall, and Kuroi drifted into his parking spot in the pits and missed hitting my legs by about a foot or less. made me jump for my life.

a surprising amount of accidents happened. the first was Bai, who clipped a wall with the right rear corner of his car, which then cause the front right to swing into the wall. the Signal guys worked hard and managed to bang it all out again. no harm done. then Asamoto clipped the wall with his left rear side. a small dent, a crack tail-light, and some scraped paint. nothing to write home about, but it was testament as to just how fucking close these guys were getting to the wall. then a big one. while Asamoto was doing Kazama's signature move (sitting on the door while drifting, with one foot hanging out of the car and the other on the gas), he missed the brake and his car (the team orange 180SX) smacked the wall dead-on. he smashed his M-Sports bumper, destroyed a headlight, mucked up his oil cooler and cracked one of the end tanks on his FMIC. so his night was unfortunatley done, but this happened a bit later so he got a good bit of action in before it happened. then, nearly at the end of the night, disaster struck again. i couldn't see what happened from where i was standing, but Kuroi hit the wall hard and scraped his car along the entire wall of the curve until it rolled to a stop. it took us a long time to clean up the resulting oil spill and debris, and as a result of the accident, the blue Signal drift twin is now a write-off. totalled, and i doubt they'll rebuild it. i even heard that Kida said they're going to get rid of it now and build a new one, so who knows what the future holds? but Kuroi was very obviousley distressed, and the Signal guys tried hard to at least get the car working enough to get it on the trailer at the end of the night. they did, and it still moved under it's own power, but the shell was damaged beyond repair. there are pictures of the damage in the following gallery. these accidents, as well as Tanaka frying all but 3rd gear and the Skyline developing a fuel leak, meant that, on the last run of the night, Bai and Kumakubo were the only 2 left to go out.

i'm sorry this is a link to another thread, but in this thread you will find a link posted by my friend Derek (Dorikin) who was there as well. since my $500 camera broke as soon as we got to the event ( :banghead: ), Derek let me use his camera for the whole day. big thanks to derek. some of the pictures, however, WERE taken by him.

http://www.automotiveforums.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=241482

keep in mind that some of the pictures that are SUPPOSED to be in sequence, are not in sequence in that gallery, so in the future, i will downsize them and post them in sequence.

i'm the guy in the blue hat and jeans (just like my signature) and derek is the guy in the shorts. a couple of our other team-mates/friends appear randomly as well.

as for shwag, i got a shirt signed by all the drivers, i got my staff jacket (the one in the pics) signed by Tanaka, i got a shard of Kuroi's kouki tail-light, a shard of Asamoto's broken bumper, a large shred of tire from when Kumakubo did a huge burn-out in front of me, and a 2-inch long piece of the orange Signal paint that i picked off one of the damaged sections of Kuroi's car. i also got Kumakubo's business card from Ebisu Circuit in Japan. but the best souvenir of the night? an 18-inch Advan Neova AD07 tire, shredded and with cords hanging off of it, which was handed to me by Kumakubo at the end of the night when we were cleaning up and they realized they couldn't fit the used tires on the truck. i'll post pics of the souvenirs once my camera is functional again.

all in all, one of the best days of my life.

ooooohh bonerage..........


great pics
i luv the KFC thing!!!
the cars are all so beautiful........

one reply?

you guys are bastards. :p

i liked them, dont worry yur my hero;)

dayum...
nice

Pretty sweet. Forget the tire though you should have grabed the SR motor from the wrecked twin :naughty: But really thats to bad about the car. I remember reading about the Signal drift twins in super street. Seeing that one like that makes me want to cry.

I laughed my ass off at this picture...

Crash Bad!
http://www.imagestation.com/picture/sraid120/pde515876f3bbfb2db2151f58d429d218/f85c30cd.jpg


Nice pics.

mad styles..

do any of you guys have any idea what the Paint Code is for the Signal drifter cars??? :confused: