| words and photos | Jas Halsey |

Beep... Beep... Beep... I reach for the alarm clock, which beams brightly in the dark of the morning. 3AM, yet another rediculously early start for a budding writer. I normally have no problems getting up in the morning, but I can’t do early nights. So finaly getting to sleep at midnight the night before wasn’t too helpful. Enough about my sleeping habbits and onto the eagerly awaited Japfest!

The weatherman had predicted bad things to happen, but luckily the weather held out only for me to get home and resemble the famous Dr Zoidberg (Lobster) from Futurama.

The art of missing the fabled ‘Coombe Traffic’ is to arrive earlier, and fortunatly this year we were being accomadated by Chris Cooke and Co. from CTC Performance on their trade

stand.

Japfest, for all those people who have never been is hosted at Castle Coombe race circuit, just south of the M4 motorway, and has grown considerably every year. Non stop track action taking place with various old and new jap metal taking part from ex BTCC Honda Civics to a Subaru Brat (EJ20 powered I may add) and also returning this year, the Extreme Team Drift Battle. The exhibitors and trade stands had doubled in size from previous years with support from companies like CTC Performance, Dodo Juice, Sumo Power, Kleers, Touge Automotive and many many more. The quality and quantity of the club stand cars was higher and more than before, from stripped out Evo’s to sump scraping Accord’s. However, there was the odd ‘shed’ as there is at many car shows throughout the uk which would have been more at home on the front cover of ‘Stuck in a 90s timewarp’ magazine. Each to their own I guess. Caroline from Sumo Power was delighted to see us, possibly due to the fact that I crossed her palms with silver for a set of Cosworth brake pads for the Civic (review coming soon). Her project FN2 was sport-ing a host of J’s Racing goodies and all new Sumo Power Managa style vehicle graphics. I like to use shows like Japfest for inspiration, and they normally get me thinking hmm what if? and can I get away with this? But one car that caught my

eye earlier on track was a super-charged red EP3, which seeming-lessly managed to annihilate most of the Impreza’s it was running with. This has however put naughty thoughts of charging my EP3 into my fragile little mind. Next year? Hopefully...

The Maxxis British Drift Cham-pionship team were running the Extreme Team Drift Battle, which

featured cars from Team Falken, Drift-works, JDM Garage, Jap Performance Parts/Garage D and Japspeed.We caught up with the JPP/Garage D team while they were replacing a drive shaft that had been torn to pieces in the first battle of the day by the newly rebuilt 2011 RB25 powered Impreza Drift car (top right). However the final battles saw Walton Smith join forces with JDM Garage drivers Brad and Ryan Hacker (bottom right), who proceeded to take first in the competition.