If you read my last post, you’ll remember that I signed off with me climbing the stairs to Yellow Hat’s roof having just been blown away by the selection of Liberty Walk cars parked up. I’d already had my expectations for the night completely shattered and it’d only just begun, so you can imagine how I felt when I exited the staircase and found Kenki Takayama’s D1GP Lexus GS350 staring back at me.
And parked up next to it was the incredible Weld Subaru FR-S. There’s isn’t a spot of fibreglass to be found in this car’s wide arches – the quality of the metalwork is absolutely unbelievable.
The RS?R JZA80 hasn’t half done the rounds over years, spending most of its time being piloted by the legendary Manabu Orido.
Always got to make sure the support vehicle has matching livery!
Ryusei Akiba’s awesome Vertex kitted S15. He actually came over and introduced himself shortly after we turned up and mentioned that he’d seen my own S-body on Facebook. It’s a small world sometimes.
TSD Styling Hiace – not my sort of thing but pretty extreme nonetheless.
At the time I thought the below car was pretty extreme in terms of VIP styling, but little did I know that I’d seen nothing yet (hold tight for my photos from Osaka Auto Messe to see what I mean).
I was loving the mix of tribal vinyl and aggressive canards on this S15, the yellow and red combo looking very reminiscent of the early 2000s drift styling.
I’ve seen videos of Waki competing in D1SL for some time now, so it was great to see his S14.5 parked up too. I don’t ever remember it sporting so much vinyl – the shark design down the side is pretty cool.
With the rain beginning to fall and some of the guys starting to call it a night we packed away our cameras and prepared to head over to Yokohama Chinatown. Since getting home a lot of people have asked me if I saw any street action while I was over there and the answer is, unfortunately, no. However, as Ryusei explained, if it wasn’t raining and if the cars didn’t have to remain at Yellow Hat overnight (it was a two day show), they would have undoubtedly headed to the docks in the early hours of the morning for some fun. Maybe next time!