With the end of November closing in, nothing was on my mind except eating a fat turkey dinner-that is until my cell phone rang. "White" Mike Liao from Blitz North America was on the other end asking me if I wanted to go to Japan again for the D1 Grand Prix finals at the Nikko Circuit on Thursday, November 28, 2002. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, which I never am, but according to my Vivid Girls calendar that's Thanksgiving. I started having flashbacks of what happened last year: sitting on the freezing track getting nauseated by kerosene heaters, sleeping on the floor, and having nothing to eat except cold rice balls. Now this was a tough decision. On one hand, I can be at home stuffing myself silly. On the other, I could witness the illest drift cars compete in the almighty D1. So I sat in my living room, on my sister's leopard print high-heel shoe chair, pondering. The first thought that went through my head was how we really need to get some less feminine furniture.This chair was depleting my masculinity by the second, but once my testosterone kicked in, my mind was set-Japan and the Nikko Circuit better be ready for us, because we're sure as hell ready for them.
Getting hassled by airport security-yet again-and an 11-hour plane trip with nothing to do except play Mike Tyson's Punch Out is enough to make anyone insane. Once we landed, we nudged our way onto crowded subways with our oversized luggage. Of course, nobody paid any attention to us since they were all sleeping. Before checking into the hotel, we stuffed ourselves full of various chicken internals jammed onto a kabob stick. Sleep wasn't really necessary since we were headed to the Nikko Circuit before the butt crack of dawn. It's about a three-hour drive from Tokyo, so we needed to leave around 4 a.m., which is about the time that Nads rolls into the office back in Los Angeles.If you haven't seen any coverage about drifting before, then you haven't been reading our magazine closely enough. In the past, we have covered drifting from the basics, to moderate, to the extremes such as the D1GP. To all you newbies, if you've ever driven and lost traction around a corner, then you have drifted in some sense or another. But when it comes to competitions like the D1GP, it takes more than losing traction, pulling up your e-brake, and making weak little screeching noises. It's all about technique, style, finesse, or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, pretty much all the characteristics that the Super Street staff is lacking. So if you can slide your way through the course without spinning out or crashing, then you're doing something right. Excess speed and lots of sick tire smoke doesn't hurt either. That all might seem easy in your head, but try doing it in front of a judging panel consisting of top drivers such as "Drift King" Keiichi Tsuchiya, Manabu Suzuki, and Manabu Orido. That's probably a thousand times more nerve racking than sitting next to the fat, sweaty dude from the DMV when you're trying to get your driver's license.