In light of all the skateboarding I had been doing, I decided that I wanted to try another board sport that I said I would never do again. Snowboarding. Back when we lived in Albany, NY… I fell snowboarding and broke my left arm REALLY bad. I can still feel the bone-scarring through my skin. I swore I would never snowboard again. Well… I guess I swore wrong. Back in January, Erin, Cody, and Chris were headed up to Cataloochee… so I decided to join them. I was never any good at snowboarding. I couldn’t get my edges down and always got hurt, so I was apprehensive about how I would take to it this time around. Miraculously, it clicked, and before I knew it I was shredding pretty well, and having a BLAST.
So I decided to buy the most METAL looking snowboard I could. And started going every two weeks all the way through March until the mountains closed. This particular trip up to Sugar, it rained on us the ENTIRE DAY. Soaking wet from head-to-toe is an understatement.
SOAKED. But that smile on my face is pretty much priceless. Snowboarding gives me that same feeling skating does, which is totally indescribable and absolutely badical.
In fact, we were so soaking wet, that we had to take a break and drive to the laundromat to dry everything off. Lieze snapped this cool photo during my laudro-nap. Once our clothes were dry, we suited up and hit the mountain again. Good good times.
In January I was also lucky enough to be able to attend the ASD Mob Seminar up in Charlotte. What an AMAZING amazing experience. Ian, Dave, and the crew as ASD know their stuff like no other team in Formula Drift. There. I said it. The fact that they wanted to give back to the grassroots community with a program like this is really too phenomenal for words. The things they taught us totally made me re-think everything in regard to car-setup for drifting. I seriously can never thank these guys enough.
In May, I ran in the Warrior Dash with (left to right) my brother Jonathan, Dad, Mom, Tom Hanks from Castaway, and parent’s friend Joel.
Everyone HAS to do one of these races. It is REALLY fun, and a very wild race! The obstacles are actually a nice way to break up the distance. I won’t lie – you get filthy dirty in ways you can’t really imagine until you do it. But it is an absolute RIOT.
Also, in May… I picked up another guitar I’ve always wanted. Definitely a staple for both heavy metal and rock and roll. An Epiphone Flying V. I also snagged a sweet li’l mini-stack by Marshall. Needless to say my office is a thrash-zone!
In June, Alex let me borrow his Honda Camino, and I went with he, Eugene, and the rest of the Swoop Jockeys on a 50+ mile moped ride from Cabbagetown all the way to Northpoint Mall for the Cars and Coffee meet. I don’t know what it was about these crappy old neglected things… but I kinda fell in love with them. As fate would have it, Chad wanted to get rid of his old Tomos A35… so I bought his.
I started sanding the paint off, put new bars, seat, controls, taillight, and made a super-sweet headlight cover with a broken Hella cover from the truck. I also made a nice chain guard out of an old ’71 Georgia license plate. I still need to get the rest of the teal off the bike – but it is definitely starting to feel more-and-more like mine.
Every Sunday morning, I’ve been riding around Atlanta with these guys… having a blast. We rode through the historic Pullman Yard, and I happened to have my Contour on me. This was a really fun ride!
In light of riding basically mini-motorcycles, I decided to take an MSF class with Cody, Wes, and Alex. It is something I would recommend to anyone who wants to ride a motorcycle of any kind. We learned a lot, and I feel a lot safer when I ride now as a result. We all passed both the riding and written tests… so at the end of the weekend, we all got our motorcycle licenses! After we passed our riding tests, we were allowed to swap motorcycles for a lap or two. I put a quick iPhone video together. I’ll warn you though – if you aren’t one of the people in this video – you won’t find it super-exciting hahaha.
I’ve been working a bit on tidying up the garage as well. I plan on putting up pegboard on the left-side wall to help free up some space. There isn’t a lot of room to move around in there, and I want to try and help it breathe a bit. The BMW has been sitting for a while, with the rear-end still broken. I’ve been too busy with work to really mess with it, but in the next month-or-so, plan to have it back up and running again!
Our German DriftMechanik counterparts, Axel and Martin, made their way over to the US for a visit… and hung out for about a week. To celebrate, we made a mad-dash to fix my broken diff, get the car prepped, truck packed and get to Nashville Superspeedway for TND’s Driftoberfest.
As we left, I stopped to make sure the trailer tires were filled proper. When we got the gas station, we found one tire was totally flat. So I put air in it, and as I did, a nail shot out of in from the pressure build… leaving a perfect hole in the tire. With my patch kit at home, I bought one from the gas station. It looked like a stick of bubble-gum would have worked better, but alas – I plugged it with a vow to recheck in a few miles to make sure it was holding. We didn’t even get 5 miles down the highway and I noticed sparks shooting from the rear of the trailer. Then came the vibrations and some minor sway. Just like that – I had my first trailer-tire blowout EVER.
I had a spare, but it was a 14″ passenger tire… which wouldn’t make it through Monteagle. All the other tires on the trailer are 15″. We called every place we could with zero luck getting a spare tire at 1:30am. The one place we did find only carried 16″ tires. Lucky for us, Sammy from Tiger Racing hadn’t left for the event yet, and had a spare for us. We limped the truck/trailer to his shop just a few miles away, where he pretty much saved our lives!
We drove straight through to the track, and arrived at 7am before the gates opened. I was exhausted, and still had to break in the new diff clutch plates. Got that taken care of, and it was track time.
After my first run, the diff was already clunking. I decided that I had too much invested in fixing the car/making the trip so we all could drive – so I made the executive decision to drive it anyway. Axel and I drove the car all day. I had a blast watching Axel drive my car. I had never had the chance to see my car in action like that. He got a TON of seat time! It looked like he had a blast.
Marlow’s Corolla was knocking, so at the end of the day we put his car on my trailer, and I decided to drive the BMW on the street back to his place. Bad idea. By this time, the rear end of the car was making horrible clunking noises. Alex was shooting video out of the passenger-side of his truck, and I floored it for the shot. BAD idea. The car dogwalked to the left, right towards his truck. I thought I was going to hit him… hence the ‘oops’ face.
Unlucky for me, after that… everyone took off and I couldn’t drive over 40mph. Equally as unlucky – my cell was in my truck, so I had no way to call anyone, and they all took off at a normal pace. No GPS, no phone, malfunctioning car, and no idea where to go. Eventually, Tony Schulz realized something was up, and rallied the troops. They had to box me in, and we all went 40mph for about an hour back to Marlow’s. It was CRAZY.
The next day, we hit the Import Alliance carshow for a moment, and then hit the Wave Country skatepark.
I skated in the pool for about an hour, then we hit the road back to Atlanta.
Shortly after our return, Martin and Axel (left to right) had to catch a flight back to Germany.
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. I feel EXTREMELY lucky that this crazy motorsport has introduced me to so many amazingly rad people. Martin and Axel are two of those people. I wish I took more photos while they were here… but I was too busy having a BLAST hanging out with them! I can’t wait to meet up with these dudes again!!
After rediscovering the magic of my photos from Africa, I remembered another photoset from long ago. After digging through notebooks of old CD-ROMs… I found another trove of images. This time… of my beloved BMW, Evelyn.
From day 1, my love for this car was of exceeding proportions. The Jet Black gloss of the paint seemed forever deep, the smell of the black leather hypnotizing, and the rev of the motor… well… let’s just say that aspect was most arousing of all.
Lost in my enamour for this wondrous chisel of German engineering, I used to wander the city streets of Atlanta… forever searching for the perfect environment to compliment to car’s stunning good looks.
Armed with a (now ‘vintage’) 35mm Nikon N2000, and a 28-70mm 1:3.5-4.5 f3.5 lens, I scoured my city for cool locales, sharing an immeasurable amount of bonding time with the car that stole my heart.
Inspired by the UK magazine, CAR… I was drawn to the idea that the vehicle’s surroundings could speak at an equal volume to the subject itself. Unfortunately (for me, anyway)… in the advent of digital photography, this practice has become commonplace.
Regardless, to me… there is something infinitely pure about these photos. No race-trim, no slammed stance, no battle-scars. These photos bring back some great memories when my car was brand-new, times seemed simpler, and my love for the automobile was the only inspiration I needed.
You can view rest of this photoset on Flickr.
While I was clearing out and backing up old files on my machine, I stumbled across this image that my buddy Carlos Richard shot back in August of 2007 for my cover-feature in S3 Magazine. I thought it might make for a cool skate deck, so I gave it a whirl. I think I know what deck I’ll be skating once I kill my current stick!
Check all the decks online in the Slide Styleâ„¢ Deck Shop.
I love when drift videos feel like skate videos. The guys o’er at Jersey Streets definitely channeled that vibe with this edit from East Coast Bash!
East Coast Bash from Jersey Streets on Vimeo.
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of awesome. Here is a brief run-down of the action. This is going to be a long post… so buckle up!
Things started off with Lieze’s graduation from SCAD Atlanta. She has been working her tail off for the past 4 years. While I have my own personal reservations with her school for buying my alma mater, I will say that their curriculum is pretty intense. They know how to put you to work, which I think is good. One thing I noticed when I graduated was that working a real job felt like ‘finals week’ all the time. I think SCAD might better prepare their students for this… because her first week of class always started out like finals week. Either way… I’m super-proud of her for sticking with it and graduating. Her ideas about art are constantly evolving and growing, which is exciting to see!
We literally left her graduation and hit the road to head north. It was a super-last-minute decision to make the trip… but a pilgrimage to Englishtown had to be made for East Coast Bash. The last time I was there was 4 years ago to shoot Slide America, and I didn’t have time to pull my car off the trailer to drive. With Will and Josh in attendance to shoot for Keep Drifting Fun… it seemed all-the-more fitting to get back there for some driving. I’ve been telling Petty I was coming back for 4 years… so it was time to make due on that.
We showed up around noon on Sunday. This track is so amazingly awesome that I was instantly bummed I wasn’t able to get there on Saturday. So many configurations… none-of-which are bad. I instantly felt at home on this track. The more I drove it, the better things felt. I had such a blast… and cannot thank Petty enough for having us up! Towards the end of the day I felt a weird vibration in the car, and decided to call it a day before I blew something up.
The next day we took the car to Roots Factory in Coatesville, PA to give it a once-over. I didn’t feel like cracking open the diff-carrier… but it seemed like something wasn’t quite working with the diff. It had more play than usual, and you could turn the wheels against themselves if you pulled hard enough. Byron noted that my car looked right at home at this shop.
My buddy Brad Hettinger had already basically stripped his down to a shell in less than a day’s time. We decided to take a funny picture for his build-thread.
The next day we saddled up, and drove about an hour and a half from Hater Dan’s house in Pennsylvania to a top-secret locale for an OG underground hoodrat sesh. What went down inside this warehouse was UN. REAL. Rob Fleming met us, as well as a few local rippers, for a crazy closed-door session that lasted several hours. UN. REAL. Will and Josh piloted the KDF van to the location to document things. They wound up with some of the craziest shots I have ever seen in drifting. MASSIVE thanks to Dan for hooking this insanity up. Keep an eye out for the Keep Drifting Fun DVD to peep what went down!
After that madness settled down, we headed back to Pennsylvania, only to re-pack and head back to Jersey for Gardella Racing’s ‘Throttle Thursday’… which brought out a bunch of FD pro-drivers… many of which (including myself for a li’l while) kicked around skateboards and braved the park on BMX bikes. This was my first time inside a skatepark since 1998… and I was REALLY scared! (more on that in a minute…) We all had a good time, including our jump-session in the foam pit (01:35 in).
The advent of the foam pit was definitely after ‘my time’ in skating. I had never been in one, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I will say this much – they aren’t exactly as soft as you think. Whatever you do… DO NOT open your mouth, or else you get tiny bits of gross sweaty foam in it. UGH. Once I got up on that railing to jump… it was a good bit higher than I originally thought. Either way, I had to get in on a front-flip to complete the night.
Next up was Formula Drift New Jersey. The folks at NOS Energy were awesome enough to let us spring an impromptu booth-space in front of their bunker so we could help sell Will and Josh’s tees. Josh looks asleep in this picture.
Tony brought by some of the new DA American Steel Tees that I designed. They turned out SICKKKKK. These are available in the Slide Styleâ„¢ store now!
Alex caught me red-handed in this photo. After my shattered collar-bone in September of 2007… I swore I would never step foot on a skateboard ever again. I was actually banned by friends and family. After nearly three years, I finally caved. I totally understand how people who try to quit smoking feel. For three years I’ve been getting the ‘urge’ to skate like a smoker’s spiral into a nicotine-fit. I have to say… it feels good to ride again – even if I am riding like an old man scared for his life.
A couple funny jump-shots that my buddy Larry Chen snapped while I was wearing Lihnberg’s wig. If you haven’t been to Larry’s site, DriftFotos – CHECK. IT. OUT. Dude is a madman behind the lens – an amazing photographer for SURE. Plus he likes jump shots, which is totally RAD.
After FD, we headed south to Baltimore to meet up with the Drift Alliance crew to go see Hall and Oates in concert.
I never thought I would go see Hall and Oates… but we had a blast. It’s so smooth! SO SMOOTH.
After Baltimore, we made a quick stop in Philadelphia to get some proper cheesesteaks & pretzels with Will, Josh, and Andy Laputka. On the way back to Atlanta we made a minor detour to Manhattan so I could take Lieze to the MoMa. It was my graduation present to her… and let me tell you – it was a GOOD one. We saw so many amazing works.
After an all-night drive back down the East Coast, we made it back home. What an astounding trip, and an incredible few weeks up North. SUPER HUGE THANKS to my buddy Dan Bailey for letting us crash at his place for so long, and for the amazing hospitality.
Southeast Drift’s Triple Threat 3 went down the day after FD Atlanta… which was awesome because it brought out a TON of FD drivers to our local shredding ground.
We towed the injured KDF van down to Turner Field so we could set up a booth and sell some swag.
Lieze set up the booth PROPER. She kicks so much ass it is hard to put into words. She is THE BEST. EVER. <3
Josh (left) and Will (right) were shooting the event for the DVD. Josh was looking gangster on my bro’s Dyno flexing the Slide Styleâ„¢ KD Tee. I see Mr. Alvendia up in the mix as well!
David Lee of Risky Devil was also rocking the Slide Styleâ„¢ KD Tee while Shawn made a funny face.
Some drifting was had. Tons of awesome tandem with a slew of FD pros like Dennis Mertzanis, Matt Powers, Tony Angelo, Chris Forsberg, Ryan Tuerck, Tony Brokohiapa, and more. It was rad. It is great to see the pro dudes mix it up with the local-folk.
Afterwards we crept through some plush downtown neighborhoods in search of parking…
So we could all eat at an old staple of mine: La Fonda Latina. Good food, good people, and GOOD TIMES for sure.
One thing I have always loved about motorsports is the paradigm of the sacrifices involved to conquer personal achievements along the way. One achievement that has eluded me for 6 years has been to successfully navigate the drift-course at Road Atlanta… specifically the entry into 10a, and linking the downhill section tracking out of the horseshoe back down to 10b (sans-manji).
Perched at the top of the hill talking to my buddy Joshua Herron and my girlfriend Lieze Truter… I couldn’t help but ponder all the years of bad luck, broken parts, STUPID limp-mode, ecu problems. I’ve basically been cursed. Seriously.
The duration of practice would unfold in much the same manner as the past… cursed. Even with a fully-functioning hydraulic e-brake – I still wasn’t acclimated to the point of total comfort. I even had another close call with a flat-spin in the narrow patch of grass between the track and the wall. My Yokohamas had SO much grip that they rocketed me right towards the wall. It scared me so bad I threw up in my mouth.
When qualifying came around… we cranked the tyre pressures up around 60-65, and with some advice from Eugene, I came flying into 10a without my normal flick to set the car up. To my surprise… IT WORKED.
With the entry checked off my list, all I had to do was get the car back down the hill out of the horseshoe. My buddy Mike Peters had called me a week prior and given me some advice on my line to help me do this. To my surprise… IT ALSO WORKED.
Back down the hill I went, with just enough wheelspeed, momentum, and RPMs to get within reach of 10b. It would take a massive handful of that e-brake… but it would work.
To say that I was excited would be a MASSIVE understatement. Hell… Cloud-9 still doesn’t quite describe it. I had been fighting this track for 6 years… and with the help of all my friends, Matt Foerst, Kieran O’Brien, Eugene Chou and Mike Peters… I was able to finally break my Road Atlanta curse.
I ended up qualifying 8th, and was paired up with Jason Giovanni from Florida for top 16. On my lead-run… Jason straighted out, and on Jason’s lead-run… I straightened out. I think it should have gone OMT, but it didn’t – and Jason moved on. I was still so excited about my qualifying runs… that I didn’t even care that I got knocked out.
I was able to hang out with all the DriftMechaniks/Team Rowdy dudes and just have a good time. These dudes are the best on the planet, and I dare anyone to attempt to prove otherwise.
I don’t expect everyone to understand what a special moment this was for me. Tons of dudes rip this track every year with little trouble. I never thought this 3300lb car could get it’s 180 horses to push it through the track like this. I had it drilled into my own head that I couldn’t… and with the help of my friends… I did it.
It is a moment I will NEVER forget.
EVER.
This project started out as a way to help the Forza community in their painting efforts. I have received many requests for high-res graphics to use as reference in the painting process. I then used that as an excuse to get better acclimated with Adobe Illustrator, and create a comprehensive guide to the vehicle’s 2007 livery. I have always enjoyed technical drawings in their precise structure and perfection. One thing led to another, and the next thing I know… I spent an insane amount of countless hours creating this. I learned a lot about Illustrator in the process, and it is my hope that this will help any aspiring Forza painters re-create the car’s likeness.
I have a ton of respect for everyone painting Forza replicas. I (still) don’t have a 360 to be familiar with the process, but as far as I know… the tools available are very crude and difficult to use. This painter’s pack took me FOREVER, and I already had most of the graphics on file! I cannot fathom how long it takes to create some of these replicas. Hats off to all you Forza painters for your hard work and attention to detail!
Click here to download the Painter’s Pack. (7.4mb – 5400x3600px)
