Having a passion for cars is an expensive hobby. But it is also a very fulfilling one; don’t you just love to go out on a Friday and meet up with some friends at a local car park and talk about cars? I used to do that all the time when I first got my driver’s license 10 years ago and my first Honda Civic Coupe. We always used to go to a Mc Donald’s at one of the main highways in Holland to get together and party. We raced in the night and visited a lot of tuning shows during the weekends in Holland and Belgium. We even had our own club called Streetlegal Honda. It was all about having fun and hanging out with your friends.

During that time, we got our hands on some JDM Option video’s and saw some small drifting videos on the internet. All of a sudden it was all about drifting. So a lot of guys went from fwd Honda to rwd Nissan. How much I loved to own a Nissan, I just couldn’t justify it at the time to buy one. So my only option was tray sliding. But luckily for me that wouldn't last long.

During all my visits to the car shows I made a lot of friends. I worked for Fuel on a few shows and always helped out a good friend of mine with his company Gofaster. Drifting was getting larger and larger and in 2005 I was invited to come to England and watch two D1GP drifters drifting on a European track for the first time.

For the first time I witnessed some of my hero’s tearing up the track. Nomura and Kazama were there to show everybody how it was done in Japan. Later on in the year we also got to the first D1 sanctioned event with all the D1 drifters present, in that time Ryuji Miki competed in his gold Top Secret S15. Those were the days.

This is where my passion for drift cars really took off, I started working for Gofaster more and more and I came up with a plan. Let’s buy the Streetlegal D1 car from Ken Nomura. Everybody told me I was crazy. But after a business plan the car was on its way to Rotterdam harbor and I was co owner of Gofaster. The car came here in the summer of July 2006 and after that we traveled through Europe for demo’s and event’s.

We bought the car through Powervehicles who offered the car to us. The car was made by Blitz for to promote the D1 Street Legal series in Japan. The car did not compete in the series so the car was in a very good condition and it didn’t had a hard life in Japan. The car was build to the exact same specification as the D1GP car at that time except for the interior that was left standard. So now I had a four door race car with all the luxuries from the factory.

We did a lot of drift demo’s with the car and many what I call static shows. The car made a real impact on the scene in Europe and especially in countries like Greece, Spain and Italy. This year we decided it was time to sell the car. This was also the time where I said that I wanted to pursue another career.

First I started with my own personal Kultivate blog, this is where I would showcase my personal taste and knowledge of cars. It really took off and I got a lot of good responses from around the world. Rod Chong was one of the visitors and he contacted me with the question if I wanted to work together on a ‘top secret’ project. Everything from that moment on went very fast and now I’m proud to be a Speedhunter.

Jeroen Willemsen