Teddy's Tales | Auto Factory REALIZE

I’d like for you to take a second the review just some of the cars which may have originally sparked your interest in drifting. Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably one of the few who got excited about this new sport specifically because of these cars (either that or Initial D).

After watching a few old Option videos last night I came to a conclusion. Had D1GP continued in the States for just a little bit longer, just enough to continue encouraging amazing looking car builds for drifting, America might have had a fighting chance at having some decent looking drift cars.

For me, I get excited about working on my car or have the crazy urge to go drifting when I watch cool looking cars drifting. It also really gives me the desire to make my car up to par with these cars because they set a high standard of example. Naturally, I want to make a car similar to those which I idolize so much because I dream of driving a car that cool.

This was originally the case in early American drifting. When the Japanese shipped over these amazing cars for the first D1GP in 2003, American companies and privateers actually put in a lot of effort to make their competition cars look appealing to avoid seeming like they were sub-par. Of course, nobody would take them seriously if the Japanese car field looked so incredible and well engineered whilst the American field looked like a bunch of shit piles.

Looking back at some of the American cars of the time, some were actually half-way decent.

But one day the amazing creations of HKS, Blitz, Top Secret, Jun, and other high end Japanese tuner shops ceased coming to America. Formula D became the only professional drifting body in America. With D1 cars no longer coming to the States, the standard for car looks suddenly dropped and spiraled into a downward snowball from there.

Nowadays, most people who are still involved or interested in drifting learned of its existence after D1GP had already stopped coming to America. Once that happened, the sport evolved in a different way here than it did in Japan, just like the different dialects of an original language.

New people got introduced to drifting through Formula D and that became the only form of drifting they knew. American style became the only style and slowly from there it kept evolving to what it is today. Most people at any given Formula D event today do not know who Yasuyuki Kazama is. They don’t know what Dart Izumi is. But they sure do know what Sikky and Hoonigan are.

What can you do? The old timers like us (shit I’m only 23) will remember the golden days of real drifting in America and reminisce while wrenching on SRs in the garage like the bunch of has-beens we are. •