This weekend, many of the best stanced cars in California made their way to the HellaFlush 3.5 meet at Buttonwillow Raceway, which was located in the middle of BFE, along the Interstate 5 highway. The stretched tire movement has finally been getting a lot of attention in the past couple years, which is awesome because I've trying to promote it for quite a while... but it took a long time for it to catch on. Now that insane offset cars have been popping up all over the internet for the past couple years, people have started building their cars with a focus on aggressive stance and aggressive wheel offset. It sure took a long time for the message to spread though. I first began writing stories about how "Offset is Everything" in magazines, websites, and talked about it at drifting events/carshows that I emceed since... 2004? 2005? It's funny to think that people used to make fun of me when I would talk about rocking negative offset wheels, demon camber on AE86s, super low down (shakotan) stance, hippari tires (stretched tires), and tsuraichi (cars running aggressive offset wheels and tucking tire). In fact, I distinctly remember emceeing a Drift Showoff event out in Houston TX in 2005, and some of the DA homies were like, "Dude. It's like negative offset is all you ever talk about!" (HAHA, they were absolutely right.) I'm so glad that multiple forward thinking websites, forums and blogs across the internet have virally spread this message and made aggressive stanced cars popular; now it's a whole different ball game!

The way a car sits has absolutely everything to do with the image it projects - it all has to be just right! Aggressive offset wheels that stick out too much = lowrider. Big wheels with thin tires (non stretched) on cars that aren't slammed enough = DUB style. (Yuck.) Slamming cars to the ground without enough width, offset and tire stretch = 1990s FF Honda style.

Since neither of the aforementioned styles are desirable when it comes to making a fashionable looking car, it's nice to see that car owners all over North America have been stepping up their wheel game - a game that was rumored to have started in Europe (gotta give props to those Euro car guys... Mk1 Golfs FTW!) or Japan (Bosozoku/Yanki car builders, kyusha kai car builders, and VIP car builders). While I'm not exactly certain of the exact origins or history of this style of automotive stance, I personally first noticed it in the late 1990s/early 2000s, thanks to AE86s that were built by my favorite drift teams - Running Free and Rough World.

It was awesome to see some of the West Coast's most dedicated car owners with aggressive stances come out to the event. I saw Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Lexus owners from Southern California; Northern Cali Toyota, Nissan, Lexus, and BMW owners from as far as Fairfield CA and Sacramento... I even saw a slammed Mercedes Benz from Las Vegas!   Read more...