A post for the Car Geeks

An introductory note... I have been meaning to post this for several months now, so this is hardly timely.  But I wanted to load some video and have had some technical issues with doing so until Santa delivered the MacBook with some video editing software.  So, this is kind of a flashback post to October (thus the shorts and t-shirts).


Japan has become the center of the auto sports world for a couple of weeks in October. The Formula 1 Race was held at Fuji Speeday  and then the World Rally series was held up in Sapporo in a few weeks later.  Both very cool events.  (Just a quick aside - since we went to this event, Honda pulled out of F1 and Subaru pulled out of WRC for next year due to the economy.  Kind of sad really... I'll be curious if this event even happens next year without two of the major Japanese manufacturers there.)

Unfortunately, we were unable to secure tickets to either one (F1 is on the sports to-do list for next year though). But we were able to go to Motorsport Japan 2008. I think since most of the cars are already here, the organizers of the F1 race get the teams and manufacturers to roll them out onto a parking lot in Odaiba and let people come out and look at them. Lots of pretty cool cars and it's about the only free thing I think we've experienced in Tokyo. Some of the highlights...




They also had a big section of a parking lot cordoned off for the cars to get out and drive around a bit. I rolled some video on the F1 cars. You NASCAR types will love this... they drive around in a circle for a while and then do donuts at the end. F1 cars are well equipped to do donuts apparently.

(had some technical issues... will have to try this one again later.)


This being Japan, they also had video games setup. One of the cooler things they had was a pretty realistic mockup of a Honda F1 Car with a large video screen in front of it. You sat in the cockpit of the car and drove on the screen. Of course this was attracting a huge crowd and there is no telling how early you had to be there to get a ticket for one of the assigned time slots.

So we're just standing around looking at cars and this Japanese guy comes up to me and hands me a ticket clear out of the blue. It was for a time slot about 10 minutes later. I'll just say this before we go to the video:

• The crowd was most interested to see if I could fit in the car. Said crowd grew during my exhibition


• I would have done better with more support from my better half.


• I did awesome on the straight-aways.


• F1 cars apparently don't handle very well off-road.

Enjoy..