NissanFest 2015 Part I

Here’s a fun fact about me: I hate car memes. If you like them or they make you laugh, that’s cool, but they aren’t my cup of tea. Sometimes, they even make me mad. Memes oversimplify thoughts, ideas and opinions and are all-too-easily shared, plugging up our newsfeeds with derivative nonsense.*

As an example, there’s a car meme that shows how excited enthusiasts are supposed to be to drag themselves out of their warm beds way too early on the weekend. That meme is a liar. My body won’t let me feel most things, including excitement, until 9 AM.

Although I wasn’t jumping for joy, I still dragged myself out of bed at 7 AM this past Sunday and began the two-and-half hour trip south into the fine state of Washington to take in 2015’s NissanFest.

It wasn’t my first rodeo – and by rodeo I mean NissanFest. I attended in 2012 and it would seem a lot has changed since then. The essence of the event is still there and in fact, it’s only gotten better. In the old days, it wasn’t unusual to spot a variety of different car manufacturers scattered across the show. With part of the festival only open to Nissans now, NissanFest is living up to its title.

For those of you not familiar with NissanFest, I’ll do my best to explain it. The simplest and most obvious explanation is that it’s a one-day festival held at Evergreen Speedway in Monroe, Washington and celebrates all things Nissan – with a few exceptions. The event is split into three different parts. First, there’s a car show organized by the team at NWMOTIV.com. They’re pretty much one of, if not the best, racket in town when it comes to putting on a show. This was the exclusively Nissan part of NissanFest, but that we’ll talk about that another day.

Secondly, there’s auto-cross. Because I’m a straight shooter, I’m going to be honest with you and say I skipped this part and shot cars at the show instead. Does this make me a bad person? Yes, it probably does. But at least I’m honest. That being said, I did grab a shot of this Datsun that just so happened to take home first place in autoX. The autoX event seemed to be open to all makes and models, but I guess it’s nice that a Nissan won at NissanFest.

The third part of the event was where picked up my first sunburn of the season: the drifting portion. Although it wasn’t exclusively Nissan, it was a drift event so a good portion of the cars on the track were Nissans. It was also 80 per cent of the reason why I reluctantly got out of my warm bed that morning.

Judging by the size of the crowd, I would say the drifting was what most people showed up for. In fact, NissanFest’s attendance (over 3,000 people) was the biggest difference I noticed from when I attended three years ago. Not only has the event gotten better, it’s gotten bigger.

If you’re looking for a competition rundown, you’re probably at the wrong place. I’m just going to show you a bunch of pictures, maybe say a few words and then tell you who won.

It’s fun to pretend that as a media guy I have no bias in what I shoot, but as I was putting this post together I realized I was full of unintentional biases. I’ve never met Brandon Schmidt, but it would seem I have a real thing for his car. I was going to try to scatter pictures of his car throughout this post, but I suppose the first step is admitting I have a problem. It was refreshing to see a car that could almost double as street car being put through its paces on the track.

It’s been a while since I was around pacific northwest motor sports, and I think I forgot just how good the driving can be. It’s a weird thing when you think of it: this isn’t a series and there are no points awarded, but people drove like it was. A cash prize of $1,000 USD is a pretty good incentive, but one slip up out there and you could end up in a predicament that costs you much more than $1,000 could repair.

There were some pretty outstanding tandem battles. Most of them escaped my lens, but I managed to piece together a few of those moments.

It’s been a while since we caught up with our Southsound Speedstar friend, Erich Hagen. The last time we talked to him he was living in the Days of Thunder and putting 1Jz-GTE into his S-chassis.

I think it’s safe to say that “things done changed” since then. Erich is a licensed Pro 2 driver and his car has gone from 1 JZ-powered to straight Star-Spangled Banner-powered. I want to see Erich and Nissan parts succeed, and after watching him drive all day, I think it’s safe to say he’s headed in the right direction. And that direction was a first place win on Sunday.

It was truly a great feeling to see how much NissanFest has grown and I’m grateful that Northwest Nissan has continued to pour time and effort into this event.

Like I said in the beginning, I wasn’t crazy about the wake-up time to get to this event and the late drive home didn’t make any better. In fact, I could find a thousand reasons to stay at home in bed on the weekend and not spend money on gas or waste time in a car driving. The point is it only takes one reason to drag myself from my bed and like all enthusiasts, I live for this stuff. No one wants to read a post about the events we don’t go to. And the last thing the world needs is me sharing a meme about sleeping in and binge-watching Netflix on a Sunday.