CAPTION THIS> Mad Max Honda At Speed Ventures
Can you guess what kind of car this is? If Mad Max drove a vintage Honda in a time attack series, is this what you would imagine his car to look like?
We were carspotting at the most recent Speed Ventures event at Streets of Willow, and saw this old school Honda with monstrous box flares, front lip spoiler and a huge front bumper. Let’s not forget the big wing up top, and the center mounted driver seat and steering wheel! (more…)
OH SNAP> Happy Birthday, Ayrton Senna!
Happy Birthday, Ayrton Senna! If he were still alive, Ayrton Senna da Silva, who many consider to be the greatest driver in the history of racing, would be 53 years old. In honor of our favorite Brazilian driver’s birthday, we’ve compiled a great collection of Senna videos for you to watch… (more…)
OH SNAP> Tsuisou! Tandem Drifting at Ebisu Circuit
I love Ebisu Circuit!!! And I’m not the only one. This photo is one of the reasons why! Look at the white S13, being driven by Naoto Suenaga from the world famous Team Orange – his front wheel is right up against the sideskirt of the purple S13, being driven by street drifting hero Naoki Nakamura of Team Burst!
No wonder people from all over the world make the pilgrimage to Ebisu Circuit in Fukushima Japan several times a year! (more…)
STOLEN> Walker Wilkerson’s Formula Drift Car!
OH SNAP> Risky Devil RPS13: Endangering Chicago
Oh snap! Just found this Risky Devil RPS13 180SX photo on my hard drive! I’m back from a period of non-publishing on the blog – 3 weeks to be exact. Sorry folks, I injured my wrist/elbow, which made it very difficult to edit photos or even type on a computer. This being said, I’ve only been able to publish new content on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. If you don’t follow @MOTORMAVENS in these places, you’re sleepin!
This is a photo of Josh Maghirang‘s right hand drive RPS13, taken while I was sitting shotgun in Leigh Roto‘s JZA70 Supra. It’s no secret that the Risky Devil crew, the boys from Grip Gambler, and all their other Chicago-based friends under the Junkhouse banner are a bunch of lowlifes who terrorize Chicago streets by driving like a bunch of a$$holes – tailgating each other at high speeds on the freeway, drifting freeway onramps and offramps, and street drifting in downtown Chicago right in front of popular clubs. No wonder all the residents of Chicago always yell F*CK JUNKHOUSE when they see these cars passing by! These guys are always up to no good… which is probably why I love hanging out with them! They are fun. (more…)
OH SNAP> Garage Autohero Datsun 510 Snowed In
This past week, the Pacific Northwest experienced a snow storm which left thousands without power. I was even stranded at home for a little while! I can’t even remember the last time Washington got so much snow! However, as I pondered the situation more, I realized that this could be one of those “lemons into lemonade” moments (or, is that “ice into ice cream“). (more…)
OH SNAP> Scraping SGV with the Royal Flush Crew
Royal Flush. If you’ve ever cruised Valley Blvd in San Gabriel or Alhambra, gone to a car meet at a boba tea house, or checked in at a Chinese restaurant at 1:30am, chances are… you’ve seen them before. Whenever I’m cruising the SGV, I always seem to randomly look out the window and see some sort of slammed Lexus or Infiniti driving by on the other side of the street with a Royal Flush sticker on the window. I hadn’t given it much thought either, until I actually met some of the super cool people from the Royal Flush Crew at the Motion Auto Show in Long Beach.
All I can say is, this crew rolls DEEP! In case you didn’t already know, THESE are the people that are causing much of the traffic on Valley Blvd, making you and other drivers slow down and brake as they slowly scrape into the driveways of your favorite late night restaurants and kick-it spots. (more…)
OH SNAP> Power Move Super Slammed S14 Stuntin’
OH SNAP> Happy AE86 Day
OH SNAP> Lucas Perez’s AE86 Photo Flashback
OH SNAP> AE86 Tandem Drift With Running Free!
For August 6th, 86 Day, I thought I’d post up a snapshot of possibly my favourite AE86s of all time – the twin red AE86 Toyota Truenos from drift team Running Free in Japan! (more…)
OH SNAP> Taka Aono’s AE86 Turbo at Road Atlanta
OH SNAP> Link YOUR Mitsubishi Owner’s Day Pics
Oh snap! We’re still working on compiling and posting all the photos we took at Mitsubishi Owners Day 2011 at the Mitsubishi corporate offices in Cypress CA. I got to the event super early, mostly because our good friend Brian Urbano from Mitsubishi kept hyping the event online through Twitter, Facebook, and direct text messages to us, saying… “Yo! Are you coming? It’s gonna be soooo fun!”
The event definitely WAS fun, but I’ll be honest. I screw up sometimes. I was so concerned with picking up a friend and getting to the event on time, I forgot to put my memory card case in my camera bag! #FAIL!!! Yup, I know. LOSERRRR. Good thing one of our MotorMavens shooters, Horacio Flores, owns a Mitsubishi Evo X! He showed up to the event later in the day and took some photos for the site! Whew… he saved me from my royal screw up! (more…)
OH SNAP> Happy 5-13! Koguchi Power RPS13 180SX
Oh Snap! Today is May 13th (5-13), officially referred to as S13 day to all my ichisan friends from Japan. In honor of the S13, I thought I’d post up a photo of a certain Koguchi Power RPS13 180SX built by a man who is revered by many as the King of the S13s – Yoshinori Koguchi. (more…)
OH SNAP> Forsberg at FD Long Beach Media Day
Today was the Formula Drift Long Beach media day. Justin Shreeve and I were only there long enough to take a few photos and some video before driving ended. Here is a photo of Chris Forsberg testing out his new Nissan 370Z – a departure from his former car, the Nos Energy Drink 350Z roadster we’ve all gotten used to. Look forward to more coverage from MotorMavens in the coming days! (more…)
OH SNAP> Scion Racing Formula D TC Unveiling
This evening, Justin Shreeve, Will Roegge, and I went to the unveiling party for Scion Racing’s 2011 tC Formula Drift competition cars, driven by Kenshiro Gushi and Fredric Aasbo. It was awesome! Great food and free drinks are hard to disagree with, especially when amongst the great company that attended. A lot of automotive industry folks were in attendance, so it seemed just like a SEMA Party without the Las Vegas atmosphere. (more…)
OH SNAP> BN Sports IS300 In The Rainy Northwest
On my way into Xtreme Toys in Portland today, I spotted this BN kitted IS300, which belongs to my friend Nick Rodriguez. I’ve never been a huge fan of Altezzas, but the first time I laid eyes on this car, I couldn’t pull them away. The stance is perfect. The fitment is perfect. The kit, paint, visors, and wings are all perfect. Not to mention, he’s repping MotorMavens. It all comes together to look so right. Cars like his are far from common in the cold and rainy winters of the Pacific Northwest. (more…)
OH SNAP> Mass Appeal was Sex on Wheels!
It’s 2:00pm on Sunday, the day after our very first (should we say inaugural?) MotorMavens Mass Appeal car show, which took place inside the Ken Block Gymkhana Grid Invitational at Irwindale Speedway. This entire event was such a blur to me! I didn’t even get a chance to have one wink of sleep on the night before the show! The out-of-state members of the Motor Mavens Crew just went to the airport, and I’m about to get busy crunching my photos for my version of the show coverage!
However, before I work on presenting our show coverage… I want to show some support to another event that’s happening today, so I’ll be driving out to Fontucky, CA for the Battle of the Imports at California Speedway. I have to give big respect to Frank Choi, the pioneer who basically started import drag racing – so attending his event is a must!
I’ll be driving over an hour to get there, so please be patient! We’ll post up some Mass Appeal/Gymkhana coverage tonight!
Before I leave though, I just want to give a sincere and heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who brought their amazing cars out to Mass Appeal! You know who you are… we gave out some awards at the end, but I don’t even feel as if we had enough awards for all the cars (and people) we wanted to give awards to!
On behalf of the entire Motor Mavens Crew, THANK YOU ALL! We love you!!!
:: Antonio Alvendia
OH SNAP> BMW 6 Series Coupe Concept
Sick sick 6 Series! This new 6 Series Coupe concept car from BMW was just one of the cars that got me all excited at yesterday’s LA Auto Show press day. I’m still editing and uploading images, so keep an eye out for a story VERY soon, but I just wanted to show you this teaser photo!
Hopefully it gets some of you guys excited as well!
:: Antonio Alvendia
OH SNAP> Shakotan S30 Street Scraper Returns!
The past few days have been super hectic! I’ve basically been shooting photos every single day since Friday! I decided not to post up our Formula D and JCCS stories just yet, because I wanted to focus my very limited time on linking up with good friends from out of town and doing some photo shoots with their cars while I was chillin out with them.
I suppose that’s the difference between MotorMavens and other websites. Some of the other sites go to the shows just to grab as many pics as they can and then leave quickly so they can post them before anyone else. MotorMavens has a different way of thinking, and a different agenda altogether. Instead of racing to get photos up before the other websites, MotorMavens values quality when it comes to the things published on the site. Posting photos quickly is important to me, but I also make it a priority to spend my valuable time with my good friends in the car scene – after all, I know that without the support of our loyal friends (this includes YOU, our awesome readers!), MotorMavens would not have come as far as it has today.
So here’s a teaser photo; this will give you a taste of what I’ve been up to over the past few days. This is Yuta Akaishi‘s shakotan S30 240Z from Northern California’s Heartbreaker crew. He just got back from spending summer in Japan a few days before the Japanese Classic Car Show. He refreshed the car really quickly, and then scraped pavement all the way from San Jose to Long Beach for JCCS! (more…)
OH SNAP> The Weekend Road Trip
Whew! We just returned from a road trip this weekend, which included driving a high mileage rental van from Orange County to Los Angeles to San Francisco to Sonoma to San Bruno to Los Angeles to Long Beach to Orange County. This was a tiring, yet fun journey… and you can be sure we took lots of photos!
We’ll be publishing a story detailing all our adventures very soon! This has been a fun trip – we shot lots of content for the site, as well as personal photos with friends that we chilled with over the course of the weekend. Right now, we’re just trying to unpack all the gear and get our photos sorted and everything. We haven’t even really slept yet ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… (damn, just fell asleep at the keyboard again.)
Please stay tuned for our first round of photos later today!
:: Antonio Alvendia
OH SNAP> Insert Your… Caption Here
Hey everyone! Right now we have a little Motor Maven maintenance to do. Not just on the website, but we also have to work on putting things together for the next four (yes, I said FOUR) events we’re doing in the next three weeks. It’s gonna be more and more and more and more hectic in the coming months – especially hard to juggle all this stuff to do.
This being said, I thought it would be cool to throw this one out there for our readers… What do YOU think would be the best caption for this photo? (Let’s try to keep it clean, fellas!) I wanna see who our most witty readers are!
If you saw a scene like this on the side of the road, I wonder how many of you would stop to spit some game at this girl?
:: Antonio Alvendia
OH SNAP> Canadian Drift Union Rocks PGP
Pacific Grand Prix in Washington state has only been holding drift events this year, but they been doing so well that everyone in the Pacific Northwest looks forward to these events now. This past weekend, was the very first Team Tandem event that PGP held. Many of the regular familiar faces showed up, as well as a lot of new drivers that I hadn’t seen before.
Drift Union was one of the crews from out-of-town that showed up for this event. They came all the way from Canada (I don’t know the exact city) and even though they were new to the PGP course, they were killin it out on track. Their super ridiculously early entries and close-following tandem runs wowed the crowd and the judges enough to ensure that they took top honors!
Congratulations, boys! Stay tuned to MotorMavens for more photos from the PGP event very soon… but right now I have an appointment to buy some super wide wheels for my S14! Now I need overfenders! =D
:: Yoshi Shindo
OH SNAP> Tyler McQuarrie Wins Formula D Vegas!
Wow. Formula Drift at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was sooooo HOT. Ridiculously hot. Intensely hot. We just got back to Los Angeles, after an eight hour excursion, creeping at around 10mph in traffic-swamped freeway lanes all the way back to Southern California. This being said, we aren’t posting up our event story just yet… everyone in our group is about to pass out from the heat and exhaustion.
However, we just wanted to take a minute to congratulate Tyler McQuarrie on his First Place victory in Las Vegas! In case you weren’t following the Formula D Driftstream, Team Falken emerged victorious, with an all-Falken podium sweep once again, with Tyler McQuarrie bringing home First Place, Daijiro Yoshihara winning Second Place, and Vaughn Gittin Jr taking home Third Place.
We’d also like to welcome Las Vegas-based photographer Farrel Dee to the Motor Mavens Crew! We’ll let him write up a proper introduction later, but for now, we’d like to invite YOU to upload your Formula D Las Vegas and Vegas Pro Am photos to the MotorMavens Forums! We saw a lot of people shooting photos this weekend, and we’d love to see your photos with links to your website and/or Flickr pages! Post them up so everyone can see!
That’s it for now… sleep calls! However, don’t worry… we’ll be back very soon with our photos and observations from Formula D Las Vegas!
:: Antonio Alvendia
Upload your FD Las Vegas and Vegas Pro Am photos to the MotorMavens Forums by clicking here!
