As mentioned in my first article, 2015’s NissanFest was split up between motorsports and car show. The car show was planned by the good people over at NWMOTIV.com and really put the “Nissan” in NissanFest. While the motorsports were open to all makes and models from the automotive world, the show was exclusively Nissan. If Evergreen Speedway was a high school cafeteria, the show portion of the event was the equivalent of the cool kids table, and if you didn’t have a Nissan you were having lunch with the janitor.
If you think I’m being jaded, then you are wrong. As a former Nissan owner myself, I was stoked to see an exclusively Nissan collection piled into the parking lot.
One of the benefits of having NissanFest in Washington is that the proximity to Canada means you’re likely to have a little more variety in the chassis’ that would usually participate in an event like this.
I know that being Canadian means I should really downplay the fact that we have access to so many cool Japanese chassis’. I also know that the other part of being Canadian is trying to remain polite and humble about the 15-year import rule.
However, visiting NissanFest reminded me of all the potential the Canadian car scene has. Yes, it’s cool that we can have R34’s and S15’s, but I spend a lot time getting stoked on chassis whose existence eludes the general public – chassis’ like this Nissan President.
Or the Nissan Cedric.
Another Canadian who made the trip down was J.J. Dubec, a.k.a. Doczilla, and his Liberty Walk R35.
Eventually I stopped playing favourites with my fellow Canadians and ventured outwards to see what else NissanFest had to offer.
Ironically, I spent most of my time at the show shooting cars that I can see on a bi-weekly basis. I guess you could call it patriotism or even favouritism, and I honestly I think it was a bit of both. But I think what made this show great wasn’t just that it was exclusively Nissans; it was great because it showed just how inclusive that exclusive category could be.