Skyline Meet, December 2016

So as you all know, Phonexius and Lagano went on a road trip, and stopped by Phoenix, AZ for some time.


Knowing they were coming, I called a few local friends and put a post up on a message board. The response that day, however, was far more than I was expecting, all from Skyline owners only! (All other cars were parked in another section of the lot.)

You're counting correctly: that's 10 Skylines, including four R32s, four R33s, and two R34s - and four GT-Rs among them all.

Panning from one side of the row to the other:

This was a nice, clean pair of mostly stock Skyline GTS examples, one an R32, one an R33.

I had seen the R33 before - the driver brought it to the meetup I set up in January 2015 - but I was seeing the R32 for the first time, and apparently the owner was local! It was a clean example, in a nice coat of Super Clear Red - the same color Jake's car was in.


Lagano's and Phonexius' cars, both looking good. Phonexius had the third most powerful car at the meet at 750HP, after my R33 and an R34 GT-R from Canada. I was in awe, despite having something impressive in my own possession.

I was also impressed by the quality of Lagano's car, which I hadn't looked at much before this. The SR20 swap made the car sound better than I'd have guessed, and I'm an RB purist most of the time!


My car and Jake's. Not much to say here, other than it was good to see these two great machines among others of their kind.

I still look at Jake's car sometimes and wonder if there's anything I could have done better. But I keep deciding his car is mostly a slightly different style, not better or worse. That said, I sometimes think I should talk him into getting some xenon headlights like on my car.


The blue R34 is owned by a local, who came to the Jan '15 meet. It's mostly stock, but still an absolutely clean and enviable car. I'd asked a few times about a going price, but the only answer I got was a smirk.

Meanwhile, the owner of the black R34 brought it down from Alberta, Canada, to show off. And with good reason: this haunting shadow of a car was probably the most impressive at the meet, and I have little doubt that he would have beaten me handily in a race. Down on horsepower relative to mine, but built as an overall better balanced package, and with more of a track focus than mine. All things considered, I think the R34 would have better traction. But that's all speculation on my part.


Finally, these two very nice visually customized GTS cars came from the west coast - one from Oregon, one from California.

I liked the R32 in particular, although the R33 was a general favorite because of its status as a clean-looking street drift style car.


Another picture of Phonexius' R32 and my R33. I was glad to finally get to look at his car up close, after having heard about it a lot.


The two R34s again. I said earlier that I thought the Canadian owner would be showing off, but perhaps that was envy showing - the owner was actually really humble about the car, which I thought was a masterpiece and thought was worth bragging about.


Later in the evening, when most of the other people coming to the meet had cleared off, I took some photos of my car next to the R32 alone.

This ended up being a nice prequel to the one on one test that was about to come next.

No photos of the actual short race we did, which ended up being in a quiet, abandoned alley in the warehouse district. Phonexius' car was impressively fast, and he piloted it well - definitely something worth being proud of. Needless to say, though, the advantages of AWD and an extra 250 horsepower became clear rather shortly.

That was one of the few times I had done a launch from a dead stop in the R33, and I managed to surprise even myself with the acceleration. I have no idea what the time was, because we weren't timing it and I was too focused elsewhere to be able to give a good estimate of time.


After that, we made our way back to the Arizona branch of VStanced Garage to double check our cars. I gave Phonexius and Lagano a few VStanced license plate frames and stickers.