Super D Matsuri took place at Grange Motor Speedway on October 9th, 2016 where Animal Style hosted one of the most memorable events in American Drifting History. I’m not saying this just because there were cool cars there, but they managed to bring Naoki Nakamura to the U.S.A. to drive with some of the coolest cars and some of the best driving Northern America has to offer.
Naoki is a 2010 D1 Street League Champion in Japan and known as one of the best drivers coming out of Japan.
We’ve all seen videos on the internet of Naoki driving with his team called, “Team Burst”, and maybe you’ve been following him since you got into drifting, but to see it in person was completely mind blowing. His set up on his car isn’t something near equivalent to that of a Formula Drift car by any means. He has some modified knuckles, your standard adjustable tension rods, extended LCA’s, a stock SR set up with an S15 turbo pushing roughly 350whp, and etc. But yet, he was able to keep up with cars that had twice the horsepower as he did. His driving is purely incredible. We overheard people talking at the event and the following words were quite often said, “I can’t believe he was able to suck up onto his door, his set up he put together is absolutely insane”. Needless to say, Naoki is an incredible driver and you have to actually see it in person to truly understand how incredible it was to see him drive.
Not only was it incredible to see Naoki drive, the entire event is something to not be missed. People gathered from all over – we met people all the way from Canada, Justin Shreeve and Joe Ayala from Tandem Of Die came from Oregon, and we even saw Villains out there who are from Washington.
The overall event was awesome to be apart of. We believe it showed America that you don’t need all of this power to have fun with your friends, just like Final Bout has been doing. It executed well the overall importance of what drifting is truly still about. If you’ve never been to a grassroots event somewhat like this, we highly recommend it. This was our first visit to an event like this, and it completely changed our goals for next year on what events we would like to go to. We can’t thank everyone who made this event possible enough for letting us be apart of this event. It was incredible to be at and we can’t wait for Super D Matsuri 2!