Yes, I know, it might be a bit too early for a retrospective on the year 2013 but I felt like looking back and sharing some thoughts on the year with my internet friends. 2013 has been another big year for TWS, maybe not from a competition point of view but certainly on other aspects. Let me tell you a bit more about our/my year after the jump.
A new year meant a new livery. Flamboyance and dare are two words that IMO describe the style that TWS has very well so the new livery had to continue that theme. Together with Russel from RSG and RE-Xtreme we made a Hugo MacLean-inspired livery to go with the colour that real men aren’t afraid of: Pink. These would be our main competition shells for the 2014 season, but before that kicked of Tijs and myself went on our first international voyage of the year..
.. Denmark! Long time friend and organiser of the Danish RC-drift series Niklas invited us to do a demo during the DHI cup; a weekend full of on- and offroad racing in the city of Odense. Since we can get there by train relatively cheap, we decided to give it a go. One of the things I immediately noticed when we arrived was the difference in driving there. Not trying to be mean but the Danish drifting looked more like rallycross than anything else. This did change though after we lend some of the drivers harder tires and in the end we managed to do a couple of nice drift trains 🙂
At the beginning of the year word got out that, just across the border in Germany, a new indoor RC-track was being constructed. The venue, named the RC Drift Arena, would have 3 seperate tracks, one of which would be a scale track like you would find in Japan. Eager to have a go plans were made and that marked the 2nd international event of the year. Since then we have visited the Arena multiple times, sometimes with all 5 of us, sometimes it were just the guys that live close to the border. The Germans drive quite similar to us TWS guys, agressive and with as much angle as possible, so it is not uncommon to see a train of 10+ cars linking the course!
We returned to Germany a couple of weeks ago for Gamescom, Europe’s largest videogame conference. We were asked to join the RC Drift Games, a new name for drift demo’s at big events in Germany. With the games returning during the Essen Autoshow later this year I’m excited about the future of this concept. Whilst at Gamescom we met with Daryl, chief editor of Gängstawerk . We were featured on his blog before the Euro’s so it was nice to meet the man in person!
The 3rd international stop was one that Tijs and I had first visited in 2012, namely the 2nd round of the French Grip-Zero competition. As I touched on in the full feature I did on it we were really glad to be back. It felt like visiting good friends even though we hadn’t seen most of the drivers in a year. It must be something in the Gallic blood but you always feel immediately at home around the people from Team Sushi-Slide(who organise the event) and our fellow drivers. What I noticed as soon as I got on track the first time was the improvements most drivers had made. We really needed to bring our A-game(at which Tijs was more succesful than me) to do well in the competition. What made the event though was the amount of fun we had with our friends from France(and Switzerland)!
The 4th country is our homecountry, The Netherlands. Why do I mention this one in particular?, you might ask. Well, this year was the 2nd edition of the Open European RCDrift Championship(quite a mouthful so I prefer the Euro’s).
With more than 120 entries this was the biggest international event to date AFAIK and it was really nice to see all of our friends again. Team Japan brought along a new face, Tatuhiro Yamauchi, who finished 2nd after 50/50king Petter Midskogen. I really liked Tatuhiros driving style so in the end I gave him my TWSxFriends Scion FRS 🙂
All of this travelling gives us a nice taste of the RC-Drift culture in different countries, but one thing it also gives is publicity. We always carry stickers with us everywhere we go and without us knowing it made us reach…
2000+ likes on our Facebook page! With Facebook being an easily accesable platform to share our pictures and experiences on we tend to post there more often than we do here. Everyone is busy but a quick post on FB is easily made. It’s a funny feeling when you realise that 2319 people “like” what we do. Only downside is that Facebook keeps bombarding us with messages telling us to pay them for more reach and “a potential fanbase of 200k people”. Thanks but no thanks mr. Zückerberg, I rather buy tires than likes!
The final country on the list is one that hasn’t been visited yet but will be before the end of the year. Tijs is going to Japan to compete in the Yokomo World series. We want to wish him all the best over there and I hope that he brings back great stories/setup tips/awesome JDM goodies when he returns.
I guess that was the end of this post, I want to thank all of my international friends for having us, and I hope that we can visit more places next year. I will be graduating University next year so I’ll be busy but plans are already being made so stay tuned!
– Bop
