It’s been a tough few weeks personally and as I wrestled with how to get myself up and running again I fell back to that which has always comforted me: cars.
I saw that local BMW specialist Garagistic was having a meet at their shop where they’d be displaying two of Rome Charpentier’s Formula Drift cars and have him available for a meet and greet for his fans.
It was a decent turnout with about 20-30 BMWs, mostly E30s which Garagistic specializes in. Perfect weather on a clear Southern California afternoon graced all the BMW enthusiasts in the cul-de-sac of an industrial street in the city of Westminster – home of the Vietnamese coffee shop and the best pho in America.
I started in the shop, took note of its cleanliness, and had a random conversation with a nice kid over a gutted, caged and 700+hp LS1-motor swapped and supercharged E30 sitting beneath a green and gold Mercedes E190 on a lift. The nuts and bolts of the convo was – modding cars is an expensive hobby. Yup.
Next I went outside the shop to find Rome talking about his FD car with some dudes outside. He explained that in a drift-spec car you don’t want a really stiff strut tower brace because in case of a big dust up the opposite sides of the chassis might get skewed in equal amounts. I’m not sure if that would mean the chassis is headed for the junkyard or if it just makes it harder to twist and yank back into place, but either way, no bueno.
He was also talking about absolutely needing to rock a cooling suit during certain events on the Formula Drift calendar as the cabin temps can get ridiculous during the summer. I kinda just wanted to wear one to look cool – no pun intended.
After that I just kinda wandered around trying to find some nicely composed shots but don’t think I got any money shots today. I was playing around shooting with a high f-stop, like F16, but I learned later that although you get more of the shot in focus, you can lose sharpness if you go to high. So lotta the images didn’t turn out crispy.
Big ups to Garagistic for inviting a buncha car nuts over to the crib on a weekend morning and for Rome Charpentier and his team for letting us get up close and personal with his Formula Drift E36 cars.
