Joey Redmond - My Blog

I should be blogging about more than this article but I have been busy and I forget most of the other important stuff that has happened since I blogged. I have a ton of stuff to knock out before I go out of town for a few weeks. Jacob Leveton was nice enough to put together an interview for C-16 Magazine. You can review the article online, it’s free to register so please go check it out. They have an e-magazine version online so go check it out. The interview with Andy Sapp and I is on page 37.

C16 Magazine

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, check out the IGN review of Slide America. It’s the most well done piece I have seen to date about the film. Thanks Justin!

http://cars.ign.com/articles/795/795953p1.html

Logan is finally here. Susan and Chuck finally had the Adrenaline Motorsports baby, haha. It has been a long time coming and I figured since we just left St. Louis I owed them a congrats! Here is a picture of the baby I got from Chuck.

Well she didn’t……but damn it sure seemed like it. Poor Susan is marching around the track all weekend and she is 9.5 months pregnant. Crazy world I tell you! Well Susan, Montye, Darren and I snuck off to IHOP in the Camry which was truly an adventure in it’s own. We finally found our way to the track where I hard parked the Camry in the WanLi pits. The look on Marty’s face when he came back was priceless.

Me yelling at people who aren’t listening.

The top 16 went down with quite some excitement. Andy Sapp took down the Whiplash truck down and advanced onto the next round. Erin Sanford in the LS1 240sx advanced along with Blake Fuller (Maxxis 350z), Daniel Willie (Batlground 240sx), Kenji (JIC 240sx), Hachi Bill (Enjuku 240sx), Nate Brasz (Cooper 240sx) and a few others.

During the top eight we ran into rain and other nonsense which produced some great runs. Blake Fuller and Hachi Bill doing battle was just insane!!!!!!!!!! One of the more memorable battles I think we will see in NOPI for 2007. Andy Sapp and Kenji went to do battle in the top four which was even crazier!!!!! Kenji just sat at Andy’s door as he never seemed to flinch or take notice. It was a sick performance by both! Kenji and Bill advanced into the finals and put another show stopping performance on for the crowd. Andy Sapp ended up taking down Gran Turismo East teammate Erin Sanford to take third place and sit on the podium. These are the two parting pictures I must leave you with…….

Kenji signing a Slide America DVD.

This needs no title…..

Judge Jacob picking up trash!!!!

And that pretty much sums up the weekend. Thanks to Mike/Glen and crew for throwing a good event. Thanks to Andy @ Theory for the media credentials. Thanks to Jacob who brought my Pelican all the way from LA to only take it back home…….Thanks the most to Susan/Chuck for a place to stay and Yoni/Russ (Exedy) for the hospitality! See everyone in LA in two weeks.

I woke up in the sun room at like 6:00am because Eric from Togue Factory stole my couch, damn it. That is what I get for coming in late at night. So who even knows what I was thinking awake this early in the morning, but we hit up Subway and headed to the track where Yoni got us in and taken care of.

Mike Shin even found his way out to the track with his new job. I think I am a failure to Mike because we never made it to White Castle!

Mike hooked it up though and landed me a perfect view of the track for the day’s events.

We had a ton of time to kill before qualifying started…..so who knows what we really did all day? This is Jessica, one of the Toyo Tire models, she looks like a scumbag in this picture because that is what she is! (ok, note…..Jessica isn’t a scumbag but the picture is hilarious)

Qualifying was awesome. Andy Sapp locked in 13th place! Bill Sherman from Enjuku took home second and to no one’s surprise, Kenji took home first place. Marty battled it out pretty well and took home 5th place for the day I wanna say. It was also great to see Dennis qualify after the horrible accident he had in Miami.

Here was Mikey at the driver’s meeting…..before he got news of Bill’s second place finish. Cheer up Mike, geez.

Once again I was the last one to arrive back at the house and got shafted out of my couch again. Luckily in the confines of the dungeon I found a dirty king size mattress to sleep on, Buster wanted to hide all his dog bones under it. I slept great……..haha.

Okay I don’t even really want to relive the travel to St. Louis but I will just for you guys…….so in the middle of a heated debate while driving through Nashville we ended up swinging off to I-65 at the split and heading in the wrong direction for about an hour. We arrive in Bowling Green, Kentucky where I finally realize we are lost…..So Montye walks in to the place and asks the guy at the counter, “Where is Missouri?” and the guy while holding an atlas replies to him, “yea, what state is Missouri in?” So we ended up leaving and heading back to Nashville, and then driving the correct way up I-24.

Well we finally got into town at like 10:00am and we drove straight to Adrenaline Motorsports to see Susan! Well as we roll into the shop, I see the JIC trailer and we find Kenji and Yukio working on the S14.

We went to the track to check out qualifying and bring Kenji to the track so he could see the venue.

Of course I could count on Chuck to have Forza 2, so I got a chance to tear it up on Friday as well. I need to purchase it when I get back home. It was also setup day for the NDRA event, so I helped Mike Shin put the Skyline in the booth. As I was trying to figure out how to drive right hand drive….I saw this and was motivated to take a picture of it.

Yes, I need to extend a big thank you to Bridgestone for letting me hide inside the motorcycle rig they brought. It had some lovely air conditioning and Direct TV! Well when I finally made it out to the track, they had some wild qualifying runs!

Andy snapped this picture in the pits today. I never made it over to see the car but Ben Schwartz after laying down some monster runs ran off the bank in turn one. Luckily he was okay and hopefully Falken/Sears Auto can get the car back together for Seattle.

A ton of guys just ran into problems with cars this weekend as well. Ken Gushi wasn’t able to compete due to a blown transmission as well. Coming out of qualifying we got to see a pretty crazy mix up for tandem! Chris Forsberg coming off his Atlanta victory qualified first proving he would be a contender to the points race this season.

Here is the Main Event Top 16 for Summit Point.

16. Hiro Sumida
15. Chris Cook
14. Vaughn Gitten JR
13. Rhys Millen
12. Kazu Hayashida
11. Darren McNamara
10. Mitsuru Haraguchi
9. Bill Sherman
8. Sam Hubinette
7. Daijiro Yoshihara
6. Ryan Tuerck
5. Ryuji Miki
4. Kenji Yamanaka
3. Tyler McQuarrie
2. Tanner Foust
1. Chris Forsberg
This picture doesn’t need a caption…….

After a crazy tandem battle Sam Hubinette in the Mopar Charger came out on top! So many people had car troubles and other issues…..it was anybody’s battle. Tanner Foust finished in 2nd place and Rhys Millen took home 3rd for Red Bull/Bridgestone. Here is Gary and CK Media doing a post race interview with Sam Hubinette.

I went to go send my congrats to Darren (Mopar PR) and I got to the rig just in time to see this masterful prank go down. Darren asked Sam to walk over and do a post interview for the Mo-Pod Internet Podcast and bam! This happened…….

All and all it was a great weekend and we are all ready for Seattle. If you want to see coverage, I have some shots up at everythingdrift.com.

Yes, like wow! It’s easily 105 outside? What is going on and where are the coal mines? I never saw any all weekend but I did convince our server at Shoney’s that I grew up in West Virginia but she wouldn’t be fooled into thinking Andy Sapp or Montye were “locals.”

Finally after getting to the track, it was a really exciting track and a wild setup. I have to say that I was missing Soldier Field’s lot in Chicago the whole weekend but what are you gonna do?

Chris Cook ripping it up! (He moved on to make top 16 Saturday)

The Falken Mustang fell into some motor problems for the weekend but JR was lucky enough to source a friends 240sx, he made it into Top 16 as well.

Here was the unseeded scores/speeds:

1. Ryuji Miki - Score: 91.33 MPH: 74
2. Chris Cook - Score: 86.67 MPH: 72
3. Todd Ho - Score: 86.33 MPH: 74
4. Tony Angelo - Score: 86.22 MPH: 71
5. Stephan Papadakis - Score: 80.00 MPH: 72
6. Blake Fuller - Score: 75.00 MPH: 63
7. Doug Van Den Brink - Score: 74.33 MPH: 69
8. Ben Schwartz - Score: 74.00 MPH: 69
9. Joon Maeng - Score: 73.00 MPH: 71
10. Taka Aono - Score: 71.67 MPH: 75
11. Robbie Unser - Score: 71.33 MPH: 70
12. Hiro Sumida - Score: 71.00 MPH: 70
13. Tommy Suell - Score: 70.33 MPH: 64
14. Chris Kregorian - Score: 68.67 MPH: 74
15. Gary Lang - Score: 68.33 MPH: 68
16. Ben Reyes - Score: 68.33 MPH: 64

Yea, so Virginia may be for lovers but who even knows what West Virginia is for? This drive is scary. I picked up Montye and Andy we got on the road around 3pm. So basically we barely made it out of town before traffic was a total disaster. This was also the first road trip for the G35 and I think it’s safe to say the last. If they tried to stick me in the backseat….I would of opted to walk to the track instead, haha. So we finally get near this place around 2am and we decide to get a hotel. Well we walk into this Holiday Inn Express with the most rude front desk guy ever. We fielded some normal questions to him like, “Do you know if a race track is around here?” “I don’t know.” “Do you know how close we are to West Virginia?” “I don’t know.” And the conversation continued in that nature. Luckily we were only about 10-15 minutes from the track.

The G35 at some rest stop in North Carolina.

They take smoking very seriously in Virginia…..$25 maximum fine for smoking in an elevator?