I guess you might call this new upload by Alexi Smith of NoriYaro fame a street driving video, but that would be focusing solely on the boring parts. It’s a few snapshots of tuner-car culture in Japan in the early 2000s, and it includes one of the best car mods I’ve seen in a while. That’s a little TV screen in those taillights.
We never get to see the car in full in this video, but any drift nerd will quickly ID the taillights. Here in America we covet these S13 taillights, the Type X ones from facelifted 180SXs in Japan.
The clip in question comes at about six minutes into the vid here:
I don’t know why, exactly, I love the TV in the taillight so much. It’s the senselessness of it, I suppose, the clear attitude that the car is just a bunch of parts bolted and wired together. There’s an engine, a transmission, wheels and suspension, sure, but there’s also all sorts of other random junk that makes the car a car. Extra stuff, like taillights. Things you can mess with. Things that make just as much sense on a drift car if they have a TV in them, too, because why not. These are silly experimentations, not too serious, short steps away from jokes.
It’s the whole air of just messing around that’s fun about cars of this era, when top drift pros of today were screwing up and messing around with abandon. You can see Naoki Nakamura’s Team BURST doing burnouts at parking lot meets and running some rather hectic looking drift trains toward the end of the video. Naoki is one of the best drifters in the world now, finally punching at the top of D1GP after all these years. It’s nice to see the environment that he and drivers like him came from.