Option — Shōwa Car Tuning & Buyers Guide (2000 Edition)
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About this issue
180 available scans from Option — Shōwa Car Tuning & Buyers Guide (2000 Edition), in right-to-left reading order. Japanese OCR and English translation drafts are available throughout. Drafts have not received exhaustive image proofreading; unreadable source remains recorded in the archival data.
Page 130 — English draft translation
…many drivers still disagree. Yoshinori Koguchi’s 180SX shows some of the best drifting in Japan, and manager Kumakubo recently adopted a JZX90, apparently hoping to bring change to the S14 era. Today each drift specialist has a different philosophy. As everyone has pursued their own approach, the definition of “good drifting” has changed from person to person. Drifting is fundamentally a free-form performance. Contests once judged on one point—“who is the best drifter?”—but deciding whether a driver who flicks into the entry or one who arrives with direct drift is better comes down to the judges’ preferences. Now that top-level specialists’ approaches have matured into distinct philosophies, the trend is shifting away from choosing a particular model and toward pursuing technique and an ideal driving style. The future is bright for drivers exploring Showa-car drifting.
It is included on “Club V02,” so be sure to watch it: the speed and angle were completely different! The S14 was not widely adopted because prices were still high. But after this event, its competitive ability became widely known and more drivers around the country began using S14s. Even today its performance is formidable, and it can deliver the fast drifting now in vogue. That has led to the myth that you cannot win a contest without an S14. Of course… [continues].
Captions and page details
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…to attract attention; pink paint on drift builds became common around this time.
The four-door cars were chosen to stand out from S13s, and owners began adding distinctive touches… .
Four-door drift cars went all-out to stand out—full resprays became routine!
…it would be fair to say.
More variety in drift cars! The GT-R also appears at Ika-ten.
Today’s dominant machine.
Even now, no car has appeared that can threaten the S14’s position. What will happen in the drift scene two years from now, when more S15s and Aristo models enter the used-car market?
The most powerful drift car ever is arguably the GT-R. Up through the R32, the ATTESA system could be disengaged relatively easily, so GT-Rs occasionally appeared at Ika-ten. They could drift spectacularly.
From Showa-era cars to the S14 era. Although the S14 had greater potential than the S13, its bulbous body and ungainly styling made it unpopular. Its fortunes changed at the Drift Unified Championship deciding event on November 2, 1995. At the time, the major drift contests included the CARBOY Drift… [source cut off].
ym
It was a competition to decide who drifted best in the battle. The winner was Manabu Orido, now an undisputed leading young racing driver. At the time he was already working as a racing driver for Bandoh Shōkai, and this was probably his final appearance in an official drift event. The only S14 at the event was the one he brought… .
The S14 era… .
Car .
…shift / change .
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