A few years ago, while I was visiting my grandparents and avoiding the outdoors like so many preteens tend to do, I discovered the wonders of G4. Between the video game reviews, snarky humor, and computer discussions I only initially understood bits and pieces of, there were two shows that really caught my eye.
The first show was Street Fury, a safe-ish for TV adaptation of the DVDs in which 'Big C' went around and covered car shows and drifting, but usually more boobs than builds. The second, of course, was Formula Drift. If I remember correctly, the very first thing I saw was Road Atlanta with Darren McNamara's Saturn Sky or AE86, but what matters most is I couldn't look away. I immediately set timers for every FD rerun I could find and watched them religiously.
One of the advertisements I saw a couple hundred times (because G4 was mainly reruns and commercials outside of X-Play and Attack of the Show) was for RC drift cars. After looking them up on my grandparent's computer, I was immediately drawn to the big 1/10 HPI Racing version of Dai's Falken Silvia but the $200 price tag was pretty huge to a jobless kid. I eventually settled on a much smaller XMOD with the drifting kit, tons of car magazines, and binge watching FD on G4 any time I could.
Looking back, I would even go as far as saying FD on G4 got me into shooting cars, period.
Fast forward a few years and I'm under a cloudless Texas sky shooting FD, and coincidentally my most consistently well-photographed car of the weekend was none other than Dai's BRZ. He may have gotten knocked out by Odi in the Round of 8, but this OG to the US drift scene is still hands down one of my favorite FD drivers of all time. Check out my shots below and stay tuned for some more photos (and fewer words) as I get time to post.
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