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48 Hours of SoWo

48 Hours of SoWo

Every year around this time, the VAG community travels to a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the Chattahoochee River. The town of Helen, GA – an old school Bavarian themed village – plays host to what is known as Southern Wörthersee.

We’d love to tell how much fun the weekend was at SoWo – but we didn’t go. We did, however, send down a couple of the homies to snap several photos and drink several beers in our place. This set is brought to you by Ian Browning – of “Ian Browning Likes This” fame. We could title this photo set “400 reasons we should go to SoWo next  year” but we won’t.

Ian and Leonard left PA Friday evening, drove straight thru to the party, checked out some cars, got some sleep and then headed back north. From the looks of these photos it was totally worth the 20 hour round-trip drive. And they weren’t the only people who traveled the distance.

With such a unique setting, SoWo weekend looks like its got a lot to offer aside from car stuff.

But we sent the fellas down for the cars. And there was some bad ass cars in attendance.

There was also some interesting cars in attendance.

And of course, what would a VAG event be without the controversial non-VAG cars showing up. As we said before, we’re into it! Better for the scene.

You can always tell when people are having a good time, enjoying the atmosphere.

We’ll have even more coverage from SoWo in the near future – as soon as we can locate the photos that Leonard shot. But in the meantime, enjoy the Ian Browning Likes This photo set.

More fun in Brazil

More fun in Brazil

Just take a look at what happened in Brazil this past weekend!

Beautiful women… and vehicles with sound to shake the ground.

Robson Barbosa
Editor Brazil
LowLifeStyle

Carlisle Performance & Style – Part 2

Carlisle Performance & Style – Part 2

In addition to walking around the giant fairgrounds and finding stuff that we thought was cool, we also had the homie, photographer, and JDM legend Jason Richardson in attendance this past weekend at Carlisle P&S. He was able to snap some photos of the show and some of the action. As you can see, the showfield was packed on Saturday!

Dirty Stancing cars getting dropped of and set-up Friday afternoon:

Shawn trying to track down the JunkStyles boys Friday evening:

Industry icons set up on the Midway:

Drifting action:



Burnouts!

Drive-thru judging:

Titans of Technology:

Tuned in T building –  SEMA x WRTeam display cars – featuring Mummbles Marketing, R Miller Autobody, RedBeard Tattoo, Creative Car-Tunes, to name a few. This row of cars was like a lesson in attention-to-detail for all the youngsters in attedance.

Also inside Building T was the Tuner Evolution booth along with their Kickin’ It Old Skool display. They brought out some real dope sh*t for the event.

Building Y – LLSxJS Stance hall days:

… even outside the building. You can stance where you want to.

At Carlisle, you can always expect to see something interesting :

Apparently someone on the fairgrounds was mad though… and everyone seemed to know about it:

We can’t lie though. We weren’t mad at anybody. We actually had a pretty damn good time at this year’s Carlisle Performance & Style event. You won’t be mad anymore either after you check out the rest of Jason’s photos from the event. Enjoy!

Checking in from Brazil.

Checking in from Brazil.

Here are two photos sent to us by our Brazilian correspondent, Robson.

We spoke briefly this week, and Robson told us that Brazil’s car culture used to be a direct copy of American car culture. To which we said, its funny because our culture is basically a copy of Japanese or European styles. But as with all cultures, it starts somewhere and grows into its own as time passes. Very cool to see Brazilian car culture doing its thing and going its own way. Wild set-ups!

Sooory for Tire Smoking.

Sooory for Tire Smoking.

We had the honor of meeting Peter Chrisikopoulos this past weekend as he traveled down to the Carlisle Performance & Style event to be a part of our Dirty Stancing display. After a long journey south across the Canadian/US border, Peter and Matt from Squeaky Clean (along with a couple others) arrived late Friday evening – almost too late to get them inside the building in fact. We understood it was a long drive and we were frankly happy to see that they were allowed to cross the border with heavily modified vehicles. We unlocked the doors to our home for the weekend to squeeze the few last cars inside. Peter’s S13 was unloaded from the trailer and the first thought that came to our minds was, this is a legit drift car here. This isn’t a drift themed daily driven “stance” car… this is a RHD beast that really does like to get sideways.

The car features a high compression SR20DET motor that runs on E85 and makes 500whp and 450 torque.

NEO Motorsports coilovers and big brakes help get him sideways and stopped.

Peter currently competes in the DMCC Pro (Drift Mania Canadian Championships) – but his goal, of course, is to be a part of Formula Drift in 2013. Good luck Peter!

After a great relaxing weekend inside the building, you know we couldn’t send Peter home without at least one little conversation with event security.  So at the end of our photoshoot fun, we decided to see this thing burn some tires.

Thanks again to the boys from up north for bringing their unique vehicles down to chill with us at the event. Hopefully we’ll see more of this car in the future.

Enjoy the rest of our photos:

Carlisle Performance & Style – part 1

Carlisle Performance & Style – part 1

This past weekend we headed out to the Carlisle PA Fairgrounds for their annual Performance & Style event. Carlisle has been throwing huge fairgrounds car shows for just shy of 40 years – and has been putting on a sport compact event for at least fifteen of those years. Back in the day this show (then known as the Custom Compact show) was known to get a little rowdy. Then came the Fast & Furious years – which filled the fairgrounds but also made a joke out of the word “tuner”. People outside the scene saw the dollar signs attached to our culture and judging politics made the original compact and performance car builders frustrated. We’re happy to say that Carlisle stuck through those years and is once again seeing an increase in attendees and competitors. We heard there was lines of cars 300 deep all afternoon on Saturday and the grandstands were filled for all of the events, so that sounds like a success to us!

The cool thing about Carlisle P&S is that you can see a wide variety of different tastes and styles. There is always a great mix of today’s current trends and the ones we loved a few years ago but would never admit to it now. It really is a show with something for everybody and the Carlisle staff does a great job putting together such a large scale event, without making it feel like a high dollar corporate car show.

We were excited to team up with Carlisle once again this year. We set up shop inside Building Y and we invited a bunch of friends and stance-minded car builders to share our space with us – we called it Dirty Stancing. We’d like to thank all of the guys and girls who brought out their fitted vehicles for our display. We wanted to stick with the atmosphere that Carlisle has already provided by having a good range of different fitment styles on display.  Mission accomplished.

Shout out to Squeaky Clean Matt from Toronto for gathering some Canadian stance cars and making the journey on down here.

We enjoyed hosting our own building because it meant we could create a reggaeton and dubstep-free environment.

As usual, we met a ton of cool people and had fun talking sh*t to all of our new friends throughout the weekend. We also got a chance to hang out with people that we only see a few times a year at events like this.

 

It was nice to see Liz in good spirits after her car accident not too long ago. Glad she was able to get out and hang with the crew again!

 

 

A big thank you goes out to Jim V who was in charge of the show this year. The homie Patrick – aka Paddy – was one of our favorite event managers to hang out with. So when we heard he was going to be moving on, we were worried the show might suffer. But Jim picked up where Patrick left off, and the show turned out great! Job well done.

We can’t wait to see what Carlisle has in store for next year’s event – and we also can’t wait to see what we have in store for next year’s event. I bet you can’t wait either. This is just part 1 of our coverage. More pictures to come in the next few days – as well as a recap of our weekend of Dirty Stancing and some features of the cars that joined us there. Until then, check out round 1 of our photos:

College Park Tuning Meet

College Park Tuning Meet

For the past few years we’ve been hearing about Maryland’s College Park Tuning Meet – from our friends at Tuner Evolution amongst others. So when we found out that it was coming up in a few days, we decided we wanted to check it out and see what the hype was all about. We met up with some homies in the morning and rolled down to Bowie, MD early in the morning. When we arrived at the venue, we were surprisingly greeted by some nice professional staff members – who were helpful and had hooked us up with a great location. We’ll go ahead and say it, most of the time when you roll up to a “tuner” event, the staff members are more concerned with acting like security guards than treating their customers/sponsors with respect.

As the morning progressed into afternoon, we realized we were a part of something big. Cars as far as the eye could see. Every stadium parking lot was filled to capacity and some cars might have even gotten turned away. It was a good variety too – S2000 clubs, Viper clubs, G35 clubs, exotics, muscle cars, as well as plenty of the stuff you normally see.

Speaking of  ”what all the hype is about”… about mid-day the IAG Performance rig pulled up with a fleet of Subaru’s. Not the least of which was this new internet sensation, owned by Joy Abdalla. So sick!

For us it was one of the most enjoyable events that we’ve been to so far. We met a ton of new people, sold huge amounts of product, and we saw a lot of good quality cars.

Yes, there were also some not-so-good quality cars in attendance, but they were just as entertaining.

Our booth was packed with people all day long – and we were blessed to have some cool cars parked with us. One side of the booth featured Justin Wagner’s turbo Civic – while the other side featured our old pal Matt Waln’s insane static 7 series Bimmer. Later on in the day we were joined by Mr (Andre) Pham and his Lexus… parked closely to a few of his Liberty VIP crew homies. We couldn’t have asked for a better representation of what we’re all about.

Count us in for next year’s meet. Check out our pictures from the event and then count yourself in for next year’s meet as well.

VolksFest

VolksFest

This past weekend, we set out for another double header of events. We caught a break on last weekend’s double header when one of our scheduled stops got postponed due to rain. VolksFest  has been going on for years thanks to HAVOC (Harrisburg Area Volkswagen Owners Club). This year it took place at Mount Hope Winery & Estate aka The PA Renaissance Faire joint for the second year in a row.

This is one of the most chill events that we attend each year. It’s cheap, it’s layed back and it features a good swap meet. However we could have done without the 6am wake-up call time and the temperature in the 40′s. We powered thru the conditions though and had a good day. As always, it was nice to hang out with friends and get more product out to the community.

Old school air-cooled vw’s outnumber the younger crowd at this event. But it’s always cool to see that euro car heritage.

More photos from Volksfest: