1999 National SE-R Convention
In 1999, tradition continued. The convention returned once again to Los Angeles, CA with one major change in the itinerary for the weekend. Taking place over the weekend of June 12th-13th, the convention had now become a car show and track event. A full day of lapping practice at Buttonwillow Raceway Park on Saturday would be followed up by a car show, picnic, swap meet, and raffle on Sunday. Once again, a recap of the event from Zak Nilsson:
I had a great time too. Buttonwillow was great…bigger and faster than Streets of Willow. I only went off the track once…I probably wasn’t pushing as hard as some of the other SE-R guys.
During the first session I was watching group 1 run, and I saw a line of cars coming down the straight, and the I saw Mike Mager’s 200SX Turbo coming up behind everybody, and Mike Kojima was driving…and he passed at least 6 cars like a rocket…cool.
We drove the full track, it’s about 3 miles long. There’s a nice long right hand sweeper on the back section that I was getting up to about 85 MPH on and I usually got up to about 90 or a little more on the front straight. My best time was 2 mins. 30 seconds with a passenger. Not spectacular but not too horrible either…it was faster than a Civic that was nicely set up with full suspension, roll cage, race tires, etc.
I think Jared Holstein’s fastest time was 2:16…that boy can drive. Hopefully next time I’ll have big brakes, suspension, and bushings, and I won’t be rolling so much.
Yesterday was a blast as well. We had the car show, we had a great Q&A session with Rob Cadle, Dan Paramore, Ken Nord and Mike Kojima, we had the raffle and gave out thousands of dollars worth of prizes including a Group 5 header, an Alpine CD head unit, a JWT ECU, a full set of TSW 16″ VX1 wheels, tons of gift certificates for Courtesy Nissan and Stranos, Energy Suspension bushings, cam gears, keychains, stickers, and endless Alpine t-shirts. I myself won a gift certificate from Stranos and a gift certificate from Courtesy. Shell Black won the Alpine head unit.
Bruce Hearn, “Bruce from Houston” won the Longest Drive trophy…still going to buy Gran Turismo, Bruce?
It was a great if tiring weekend, and I loved every minute of it. I’ll definitely be going out to Texas next year for Convention 2000.
Big thanks to Emond Ling who did a lot of the organization, Justin Choi for getting a lot of the sponsors in, eRAM for setting up with their electric supercharger demo, Dan Paramore and DPR for supporting the SE-R group wholeheartedly and giving up a lot of time and effort to support us and our events, both of them; Energy Suspension for donating prizes and loaning their tent, Steve and everybody at SMC for showing up at both events as well and supporting the SE-R group in full. Also my personal thanks to Steve for giving me some water and helping me load up my car when I got dehydrated…it was hot at Buttonwillow.
Thanks to all our sponsors who couldn’t make it, and thanks to everybody that helped out at the convention…Ryan, Bryant, Ken, Mike K, Mike M, Sharon for organizing all the food and drinks, Jared especially for the t-shirts
Also, I took some video footage and I’ll be trying to compile it all sometime soon…if anybody took any in-car footage at Buttonwillow, let me know, or if you took any other kind of video at Buttonwillow or at Veteran’s park. I’m going to see if we can’t get that tape together for people who couldn’t make it to the convention.
Tired but happy,
Zak
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