Its hard to think that another year of Prodrift has passed us so quickly. To be fair we were off to a fantastic start with Ennis weather wise. The typical Irish early good weather which results in a summer of rain as punishment, this didnt stop competition and even though Juicebox didnt make it to two of the events the finale in Mondello more than made up for it.
What I love about Japfest is the amount of racing and activities that are on throughout the day as well as the show thats inside the paddock. It can be a somewhat overhwleming task to cover everything as you have time attack, Prodrift, drag racing and track time on all at the same time. There’s something for everyone.
It has to be said that Japfest 2011 was such a good day, not because team need for speed came to town… which don’t get me wrong was a good part of it too, the amount of people and cars that showed up was really something. It just goes to show that the scene is still holding it down regardless of this economic bullshit. Everyone should give themselves a pat on the back for effort. The car park usually has just as much interesting machines as the show your attending, that’s why here at Juicebox we love lurking the car park to see what the people are driving.
So it has to be said Heatwave 2011 actually turned out a lot better then we had expected. Its no secret that Ireland is filled with nice cars. Properly built clean cars exist and many times over the years going to shows these cars would never be on show, in fact most of the time it would be the exact opposite, with only a handful of cars on display which would make you look twice. Not taking away from the work of some people but the car scene has definitely changed and it was only a matter of time until the shoes would reflect this. It was certainly a different line up of cars compared to lets say 2005!
The weather looked gloomy all day, and many feared rain. Somehow or another nature decided not to be horrible as usual leave drifting alone for the day in Fermoy. The gloom and dull weather didn’t stop some epic battles taking place which in turn made the crowd forget about the dullness and greyness. Instead drifting put a smile on peoples faces and that’s what its all about.
With every decent car Event Ireland, it usually means a somewhat decent selection of cars that have been driven to the event by you, the car enthusiast. This time we went lurking the car at Prodrift Fermoy to see what you guys showed up in, its a g glimpse into what the scene is like at the minute and most of the time we find some good and some bad gems lurking amongst the crowd.
Waking up early Sunday morning and looking out the window to see another day of glorious weather was a rare feeling. Just as things got underway the track claimed another car as we saw a collision between Damien Short’s Corolla and Nick Quealy and his R32. Sadly for Damien the 86 would not make it back onto track for the rest of the event.
We decided to take the trip up to Dubshed up the North of Ireland. Having missed it the year before I really wanted to make sure to get it up on the site this time around. As I’ve said many times, the Japanese car scene dominates the south of Ireland. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, to each his own but the intentions of making Juicebox in the first place was to get a good mix of decent cars on the website which represent to finer parts of the Irish car culture. Finding a decent VW down the south really is a hard mission. Yes they do exist. But usually their owners aren’t the type of people to have them on show or really bring them around too often to be photographed. Even finding them online is quite the challenge. We ended up seeing so many car’s from the south at the show which left us scratching our heads wondering where they had come from!