After getting some much-needed shut eye on Friday night, Alicia and I got up at 5:30 on Saturday morning and met up with Kyle and Jason in the lobby of the hotel shortly after six. We sat and had some breakfast for a while, all feeling pretty beat from the day before. The small Asian woman that ran the breakfast cafe at the hotel came up to Alicia and I and told us not to trust Jason.

“He crazy. He take the steering wheel right out of his car! I don’t trust this one…” she told us with a smile. Pretty hilarious- I guess she just could not understand why Jason’s Nardi was sitting on the table while we ate breakfast.

After breakfast, we hopped in the cars and cruised across the street to gas up and get some ice for Kyle’s cooler. Thankfully, the cars were still there and unharmed in the morning, lol. No La Quinta action at this hotel!

Once that was taken care of, we made the cruise out to Nashville Superspeedway. For some reason, Kyle felt like driving about 95 MPH initially when we first got on the freeway. I know his speedometer had been acting jenky for a lot of the trip though, so I guess that was all it was. He didn’t even know he had been driving fast when I asked about it later, lol. Thankfully we slowed to our normal pace because we saw a line of about five cars pulled over just before the exit for the track. Not a great way to start your morning…

This was when the size of the event actually hit me. The line was already out onto the main road when we arrived at 6:45. Alicia and I were totally in shock- so awesome. People always say that you can’t appreciate or understand the size of this event until you are there in person, and I have to say I totally agree. It’s for sure the coolest and craziest event I have ever been to.

Here we are waiting in line to get into the track. Thankfully, they opened the gates early and the line moved pretty quickly.

Once we got inside, the flag people directed us to the left, which was the gravel parking area of the infield. Not cool. We weren’t too excited about parking on gravel all day. Kyle asked the guy if we could go to the right onto the pavement, but he said no. We sat for a minute or two trying to decide what to do and asked another guy if we could go to the pavement side. He said yes, so we made our way over to the paved infield area near the pits for the drift event.

We cruised up and down the aisles a few times and eventually decided to try our luck with a spot on the end of the aisle. It wasn’t really big enough for all three cars, so we parked mine out in the walking/driving lane and decided to wait to see if we would get yelled at. Thankfully no one seemed to care, so we set up the tent and chilled out in the shade for most of the day. This turned out to be an amazing spot since there were a ton of people walking by. I was shocked at the amount of attention our cars got throughout the day!

I don’t have any pictures from our spot the first day, so I am going to use these shots that Joey over at The Chronicles took. We were fortunate enough to meet Joey, DPK David, and Big Mike at the event on Saturday. They had nothing but awesome things to say about our cars, which was pretty crazy to us. I have to admit that I didn’t know much about these guys until Kyle explained it all to me (Kyle used to be a big Honda guy), but I had at least heard of The Chronicles. Quite a compliment to say the least- thanks again for the shots Joey!

Another cool part of day 1 was meeting up with Alex (Treefish on Zilvia) and Kevin (garagelu on Zilvia). Kevin went to school in Michigan and I met him a few years back at a dyno day when he had his S14 and I still had my Solara. He recently picked up an immaculate S15 and has done a little work to it, so I got to check that out at the meet and catch up with him, which was really cool. Alex was a really cool guy as well- LOVED his car!

I give him a lot of credit for drifting that thing- I know I don’t have the guts to do it with mine! I wish we had a chance to get some pics of the cars together, but Alex only came up for day 1 to rock the drift event and headed home after that.

After day 1, we went back to the hotel and hopped in the pool. It felt so nice to cool off after being out in the hot sun all day. After that, we showered and met up with Kevin with the S15 for some dinner at a Japanese steak house in Murfreesboro. There was a small gathering of cars across the street, including the blue CCW MK4 Supra (that was nuts), so we hung out and chatted over there for a bit after dinner. From there we all retired back to the hotel and crashed yet again before another early morning on Sunday.

There are a TON of pictures of the cars from day one floating around on the web- I’ll try to collect a bunch of them and toss them up here for my next post before I dive into day 2 of the event. Anyway, stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Damon