Tag: John Zhang

The couple of days before AUTOCON were super stressful. Most of us were in a frantic hurry to finish our cars for what we expected to be an awesome show. Some of us even worked on our cars the night before the show, while we were having our family Christmas party. I only had 1 hour of sleep total for the 2 days prior to AUTOCON. There were a lot of disappointments for my car even though I had put so much work into it. My wheels weren’t sealed correctly, my body kit didn’t fit, and my motor was only running on 4 cylinders. Despite all that, I still looked forward to AUTOCON because of all the hype. People mentioned how great of a show it was last year, so I expected the same this year. But before I tell you how the show was, I’ll just give you guys some insight on what Royal Origin was doing during the show.

Our roll in time for the Royal Origin x Canibeat collaboration was at 7:00 AM. Yes, that fucking early. So, we had to gather up the whole crew and meet up beforehand at 6:30AM. We had 31 cars total, including Royal Origin, goodfeeling, Sexy Squad, Lowballers, Boss Company, and Studio. Caravaning to the event was freaking awesome; it was like being in a parade of slammed cars. If that’s how my day was going to start, I knew that the rest of the day would be even better, right? Wrong. When we got there, all we saw was a parking lot that was gated, with a deep incline where most of us scraped our cars while going in. When they said El Toro Air Field I was expecting an airplane hanger or being on an air strip. Nope, it was just a parking lot that smelled like manure, like forreal. Thank the JDM Gods that it didn’t smell like that the whole day; it was either I got used to the smell or it just went away magically. Anyways, I left around 9:00 AM to go to 714 Tires to get my Equips remounted and was hoping it would hold air. Therefore, I missed the staging part of the show. From what I was told, Justin just gave us a corner and said do what ever we want. We were all pretty surprised because we thought that since we were told to come at 7:00 AM sharp, they would have a plan for us that required us to be done setting up early. If we knew that that was the case, we could have just come later and staged ourselves in 15 minutes because all we did was park the way we do at meets. Randomly. It was a waste of our time because all we did was stand/sit/sleep from 7:00 AM to 11:00 AM.

When I got back, the food trucks were starting to park and open up. The gate that the vendors and people who were showing were entering through was still open, which I thought was a convenient way for us to get to the food trucks. Unfortunately, when I tried taking that route to get to the food trucks, it was closed. Because of that, we had to go through the entrance where they were searching people, walk all the way around the gate to get to the food trucks and then come back and get searched. What a hassle. This is a little diagram of how it looked like, in the picture by JDM Life Style. The red spot is where ROYAL ORIGIN was, the pink spot is where the new entrance for spectators was, the blue spot is where the food trucks were and the yellow spot is where there was a convenient pathway, but they closed it. The light blue is where they should’ve had AUTOCON at the air base hanger…

Now, you must be thinking “Fuck Minh, you’re so fucking lazy and it’s just that you guys were placed so far, so it was inconvenient for you guys.” No ninja, we were technically the closest to the food trucks. Imagine if we were in the corner right next to the yellow spot.  I would have to cut through the entire show just to get to the food trucks.

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