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The first Sunday of December and
time, once again, for the quarterly Hawaii "Hachi Meet"
organized by Lincoln Chee and Mark Danao. Lincoln and Mark have been
putting together these little gatherings for hachi-roku enthusiasts
for as long as I've owned my car and the hachi cult seems to be
growing according to attendance numbers.
As always, the hachi meet was
scheduled for a Sunday with a initial meeting time of 11am at
Kapiolani Community College. I headed out from Kailua at about
11:45am, not even bothering to wash my car since the weather had
been so bad on the Windward side for the last 2 weeks. Good call as
I got about 5 minutes down the road I ran into a torrential downpour
of rain at the Castle Hospital interesction. Not wanting to drive
over the Pali Highway without A/C or even a working fan in my car, I
quickly turned around and headed to town the Hawaii Kai way.
After cruising through Hawaii Kai,
the weather seemed to clear up and the sun came out for a little
while. I could see the hundreds of bikers out for their Sunday ride
were slowly migrating to the east side of the island for some sun.
Knowing that it was only 12:15pm,
I stopped for Starbucks at Kahala Mall and took a few pictures of
Kell Komatsubara's new project, an S2000 powered FC3S drift vehicle.
They were working on the car just a few streets down from KCC and
have almost finished stripping away just about every non-essential
component on that vehicle.
As I pulled up in to the KCC
parking lot, a saw a few familiar faces including some long time
Corolla enthusiasts and a bunch of Drift Session drivers. Lots of
new people as well. The Corolla market has awakened in Hawaii as
dozens of new enthusiasts have been hoarding any GTS or SR5 Corollas
they can get their hands on.
It's evident that the Corolla
owners are starting to invest more time, money, and effort into
their vehicles nowadays. Stocks and Celica Supras have been replaced
by wide SSRs and Longchamps; US bumpers have long been discarded in
favor of JDM Trueno or aftermarket aero bumpers.
Shortly after arriving, Lincoln
notified everyone it was time to roll out and head for the next
stop: the Kailua H3 Lookout. After a quick sprint through the
surrounding streets in Kahala, it was onto the freeway where you
could see everyone opening up their vehicles... until we hit bumper
to bumper traffic at the Punahou overpass.
When we finally made it to the H3
Freeway, we encountered our next obstacle: heavy rains. I don't know
about you, but GTS winshield wipers don't move that fast. The rain
was hard and heavy all the way to Kailua. Luckily the H3 lookout was
clear. We stopped for a few minutes to take picture and allow
stragglers to catch up and then it was off again to Enchanted Lakes
Shopping Center. Lunch at Enchanted Lakes
Shopping Center is the highlight of any hachi meet since it's one of
the few places you can get Round Table Pizza.
After lunch, the rest of the
cruise went back to town by Hawaii Kai way and ended up at Kakaako
Waterfront Park. The occasional hood was popped and the crowd would
descend upon the car to discuss various performance modifications
and aesthetic additions. Besides the rain, it was an overall good
cruise for the month of December. A decent turnout and lots of great
looking hachis. See you at the next meet.
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