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WATERFEST thru the eyes of a mad bastard
**VERY LONG**
let me start by saying that this was the best waterfest showing
yet!! i'm sad that it is over....
and now fopr the warning: this is one super-long email. but it's got links
to pix and some videos. take a look at it, but remember that this is a
collection of things that happened over a very exciting 5-day period. you
have been warned...
THURSDAY 2.00pm
i'm going nuts at work, trying to get all of my stuff finished
before i leave. out of the blue, the VP asks me to go to the US consolate
in toronto and do some stuff for him. however, the consolate is open to the
public from 3 to 4 pm. WTF? anyways, i manage to get down there and have
everything done in time. stress levels rising fast as i try and negotiate
thru traffic coming out of the downtown core. having an entire city block
cordoned off due to a fire does not help matters any...
THURSDAY 6.30pm
must complete the reconstruction of aleecia's GTI
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/01aleesGTI.jpg) . a
bunch of stuff is left, but it's small stuff that can wait. a lot of it
does...and it still is waiting....we'll get to it soon.
garth and anthony come by and watch me try and install 1 jamex
hoodlift in the GTI. it takes me about 4 hours only to find out that i
suck,
and that the damn thing doesn't fit right. oh well.
alee, todd, al, anthony, garth, and myself head out to the local coffee
time to look at all of the ginos in their mustangs. italians are funny
creatures. nothing happens, so we all blast back home and go to bed by
about 2.30am
FRIDAY 8.00am
well, i slept a good hour longer than i intended, looks like a lot
of the fixes that i was going to do are going to have to wait til we hit
joisey. thanks for waking us up, al!
kev and pat show up in kev's phat-ass mk2 jetta slalom, sporting
pat's beautiful 17" CSAs
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/02kevsslalom.jpg). adam
shows up soon after that,
about 30 minutes later than the time that we planned to leave, which was
about 5 hours earlier than we actually left. adam's badboy fox
(***************)
won last year's fox class, and is looking to make it 2
years running.
alee needs to get an alignment, and was scheduled for 8am. we get
there at 10. the mechanics start a bit after that. they finish sometime
after noon. argh.
FRIDAY 12.30pm
we fill up on sunoco94 and head out in the rain that just started.
:( but we soon outran it :)
everyone followed me on the way to damian's, and damn-near lynched
me as i led them on a wild-goose chase across the badlands of pickering. i
can now get to his place from ANY direxion. sorry about that people! as
soon as we head for the 401, we see thatit's all about the bumper-to-bumper.
bloody traffic. damain to the rescue on this one, as we break out and take
the side-streets for a couple of clicks, and bypass the meat of the traffic.
FRIDAY 3.15PM
pretty fun ride, with the lot of doing about 130ish(km/h for you
yanks out there). we passed a VW pointer () and i was freaking! i swear to
god that it had columbian plates, or something to that effect. really neat
little wagon!
FRIDAY 4.00pm (or so)
we made it to kingston, and picked up ian, only to find that alee
thought that her GTI had dusted first gear. right away i was trying to
picture who would go in what car, and where we would put all her gear. i
hopped in and took it for a ride. first gear was still there, but getting
into it was difficult. as were the restof the gears. the car just felt
weird. so we pop the hood (which was stuck in place, but soon remedied by
alee) and right away it was apparent what the problem was...the rear motor
mount had split in half and was resting against the linkage. no problem!
these things happen. one of my mounts had cracked on me in the
sciretta (http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/04sciretta.jpg),
and botch kid destroyed rich deede's poly
mount at last year's waterfest. anyways, we ripped that out of there and
dropped the motor back on the ground. took it for a quick spin, and right
away, i noticed that the problem had not disappeared. of course, seeing
that the motor was resting on the lower sway bar led me to believe that
things were amiss....
we drove it to the nearest sunoco (about 400 feet) and filled up
again. at which point we took a look under the hood again and noticed that
the front fount bolts had not been installed! ouch. so, the car was
driving with only the side mounts. not good. after about 15 minutes of
fidling, we managed to hook up the front mount. and the rest of the journey
to NJ would have to be done without any clutch dumps or really hard shifts.
FRIDAY 6.00pm
crossed the border without incident. almost lost the front of the
car on an inch tall plate that was on a bridge. no warning at all, and i'm
doing about 80 in a 40 zone. i mash the brakes and slow down enuff, and
almost got rear-ended by alee and damian in the GTI. pulled alongside a
worked boxter not too long after that, and harassed him for abut 10 seconds
before he punched it. he had the gumption to pull on me by about a
car-length through third gear, but al in front of me, and smokey on the
other side of the highway quickly ended our duel. he won hands down, but it
was fun nonetheless.
FRIDAY sometime at night
booking along at about 140 (85mph) and i feel the car lurching in
the long sweepers. i assume that i'm getting low on go-juice, but the guage
says 1/4 tank, and the trip odometer says 350km. i should have another
50km, even with the beatings that i've given it. pretty soon, it's lurching
down the straights as well, and i end up having to pull over. out of gas.
shitty. no one has a gas can, so alee and damian in the GTI, and kev, pat
and ian in the slalom all jam out in search of 94 octane. they come back
about 25 minutes later, and it was pretty good timing, cuz i was ready to
kill todd who (incorrectly) says that we were in the middle of an
uphill grade, when i told him that we were (correctly) on a downhill.
whilst waiting, i recall that after the last fill up, i forgot to press the
trip odometer until it was at about 54km. verdict: i am a tit monkey.
we fill up with a gallon of gas, head down to the gas station, and
almost get into a scrap with some drunk yokels in a brown automatic 84
camaro that's doing brkae torques all over the place like a mutt marking
it's territory. these shits were complete wastes of flesh, i kid you not.
another hour passed and we were in the middle of some mountains with
about 4 open lanes of blacktop. we passed a crap old omni that tried
hanging for a bit, but he gave up after a while. the way this cat was
driving made me wonder if he was drunk or high.
SATURDAY 1am or thereabouts
we get to the fairfield ramada and run into the BC crew which
includes none other than one riley mcdowall and his better half tania, and
riley's super beautiful mk2 16V rocco with all the trimmings. also there
was the momentum motorsports crew (http://www.momentummotor.com), with their
300+hp 1.8T syncro mk3 golf
(http://www.momentummotor.com/alain%20syncro.htm). you ain't never seen
clean like this before. they also had their "runabout". a beauty mk4 1.8T
golf with 19" rims. 19s seemed to be the order of the day. i must've seen
about 6 cars in total with 19s on them. a set of those are worth more than
my fricggin car!! the BC massive are on a whole different level, and are
very cool indeed. must be the dank...
we get to our room, and look out the window, only to find that it
overlooks a walkway and the windows to the hotel's pool. WTF?! i made sure
to book this room in april, when waterfest was first announced, and we get
stuck with this? hell no. so i went down to the front desk and talked with
the dude behind the counter. at first he was hesitant, but i appealed to
his softer side and talked of how long i ago i had planned this, and the
security issue, etc. he was cool about it, and within 15 minutes, we were
lounging in our new room, on the first floor in the corner, with what were
to be our parking spots for the remainder of our stay right outside the
window! perfect.
SATURDAY 5am
after chilling with the momentum crew for a bit, i moseyed on back
to the room, but found that i couldn't sleep (maybe the 6 wakeups that i had
popped within the last 16 hours were helping out, i dunno. the phone rang,
and my man anthony was on the horn ************. he, garth, bokchoi, and
vince had just shown up. i met up with them and we grabbed some chow. the
waitress was HOT, but she wouldn't give in to my constant wooings. she was
tuff, baby, i'm a hard man to deny...
so, the lot of us went back to the ice chamber (aka garth and
anthony's room) for a quick sensei refreshment, and i floated back to my
room, fully capable of sleep.
SATURDAY 11am
woke up and hit a diner with the VWoT
(http://www.lunaticfringe.org/vwot/) crew. this place was crazy. the food
was really good, and there were honest-to-goodness vinnie's and carmine's
walking around. this place must've been some kind of mafia front. i didn't
care. the food was all that mattered. and the waiter was some kind of
memory-dynamo. this guy took everyone's order and got everything right
except for my shake. he brought me a vanilla instead of a strawberry! this
guy had the skills to pay the bilss, i tells ya.
SATURDAY afternoon
met up with just about everyone else: the maine crew (tony, derek,
adam, and the ladies - sorry i didn't get the names, girls), the rochester
geriatrics (cope (jim), self-inflicted face-masher (brett), and mooch
(leach...same same)), the ohio crew (daun, mer, ben, angie, marco), the
philly posse (cammisa...he's a gang of one), all sorts of people from the
west side of the country (chris g, t-boik, and kevin:collins (what's up with
the colon?) - actually, i never met kevin:, but he was apparently there),
and i can't forget groupe la grenouille (botch and burnt), and all sorts of
other people from all over - eric, mad matt, jonas, jasin larsen...too many
people to list. if i didn't mention you, it's cuz i couldn't think of you
at this very moment...i'll remember in time.
alee and i put some finishing touches on her GTI. we actually
brought down a skilsaw and i was cutting up some wood that we were using as
a floor for the trunk. i must say that it turned out wonderfully. all the
while that we were working on the GTI, the burnouts were happeneing on the
other sie of the building. and me being me, i was going batty thinking of
all the wicked sites that i was missing. i wanted to take part so badly.
i recall anthony coming over to get his car, saying something about "showing
these people how we do up in TO" or something like that, and that was it for
me as well. we both went over there and started in on the tire-shredding.
i did 2 half decent runs, one of them with a 180º at the end of it. it's
amazing how the mad cheering of a crowd of 200+ people will get you to
disintergrate your perfectly good tires. the rest of the afternoon was all
about burnouts and watching cars go by real fast and whatnot.
somewhere around the middle of the afternoon, scott from ohio came
around in his wife's (?) 1.8T passat and showed everyone exactly what a
proper burnout is
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/08scotty.jpg). he locked
the rear brakes, dumped
the clutch, and rode it out for over a minute. he was moving along so
slowly that i walked beside him and was holding my hand over the smoking
tire. so, he ripped it for about 300 feet, at which point he was at the
entrance to the street, looked to his left, and turned right down the
street. all the while, smoking the crap out of these poor rubbers. did i
mention that they were 19s? madness. coolest kid, tho.
anyways, when i finally finished putting the GTIs floor together, i
swapped my front tires out of my car with 2 donuts that i brought. i had
every intention of doing these pigs in until they exploded. however, it was
simply not to be. when i put the car on the ground, the bottom 2 pipes of
my header were approximately a quarter inch off the ground. hitting a small
bump would cause my car to bounce enough to crack the header, and i was not
down with that. i figured that i could dial my suspension up (i've got
coilovers) but they were dialed all the way to the top, so i was stuck.
pissed me right off.
not long after that, anthony came around and told me that he was
going to do another burnout. you should've seen the bloodlust in this
fuckers' eyes. i asked him if he wanted us to hold his car, and he said if
it's alright with us, then it was cool with him! i sprinted to the back and
got a bunch of the TO boys together, and told them the plan. garth
(unwillingly) donated his corona to lube up the front tires, and the lot of
us held the car whilst anthony BBQed his rubbers
(http://www.mindspring.com/~bbuxton/vwjetta/images/video/RedA2GTI.mpg). at
this
point, i was so pumped i could've run a marathon.
todd had been taping a bunch of the burnouts, and by the time that
anthony got there, there was a sea of people. so, i figured that if i'm
going to fuck up my tires, i'm going to make sure that i can watch it over
and over from a good angle. i asked some kids standing by if we could send
todd up to their room to film my burnout from there, and they were cool with
it. so, with todd upstairs, and my TO VW people informed of my intentions,
i grabbed my car and brought it around. you can imagine what happened
(http://www.mindspring.com/~bbuxton/vwjetta/images/video/YloScirroco.mpg).
that was fun. anthony had the better burnout by far cuz
he's got all the weight up there...VR6s rock....
and the best part of it is that i didn't take much meat off the
tires!
lots more tire-toasting happened, but i tried working on alee's GTI.
i say try, cuz i would get distracted every 2 seconds it seemed. either
meeting people (it was at this point that i met tosha), or running here or
there. it took me 4 hours to put a detachable steering wheel on
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/11steeringwheel.jpg).
that's just retarded. it was around this time that i was informed that
there were some people looking for me. namely: pat, kev, and ian (from here
onwards known as the booze hounds). i spent about 15 minutes on a
walkie-talkie-thing trying to tell pat where we were, which was about 200 ft
from where he was standing. i finished working on the GTI, and cleaned up
for dinner, which should've been japanese, but ended up being mexican, cuz i
seem to get lost very quickly.
anyways, i'm ready to roll, finally, and who do i see sitting on the
ground in front of alee's GTI and my roc? the booze hounds, jim, brett, and
a bunch of others
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/12crowdofdrunks.jpg). it
took about 10 minutes just to get the
wasters out of the way so that we could move (jeez it's hard talking to
these guys when they're like that). dinner was nice, and as soon as we got
back to the hotel, i ran into cammisa, daun, leach, etc, and jason informed
me that one of the canucks had fallen about an hour earlier.
so i went to the place where he was (the grassy knoll in front of
the hotel) and looked on in admiration (not) as kev lay on the floor.
drooling.. it was a pretty sight, indeed. ian was noticably concerned, but
giggly. pat was too drunk to realize how bad of a state kev was really in.
so, me and ian dragged/carried kev to my car and tried strapping him in.
yeah, that worked. within 30 seconds, he was yakking dark runny things all
over the place. we figured that if he got most of the good stuff out, he'd
be in better shape. so, since he was about as useful as wet spaghetti,
someone needed to make him barf. enter me, left stage. that was really
quite nasty, but what'sre you going to do? a bud is a bud. so, there i
was, sitting in the driver's seat, stabbing this dude's tonsils with my
fingers. nasty... i must say that his white shirt offset the dark spots
really well, and in the half-light of the parking lot, one kid was screaming
that he was gagging blood. stress levels raised all around, as we tried to
get him out of the car and then called for an ambulance. oh yeah, he puked
in my car...i still gotta clean that out.
some cops showed up to help take care of the situation, and pat
suddenly became a real nuisance, saying how all of kev's brothers had the
same thing happen to him, and was terrified at how much this whole fiasco
was going to cost if it reached a hospital room. he made few friends that
night, but that's alright. hindsight is endlessly hilarious, and at this
moment, i'm laffing at the memories of it all.
the ambulance showed up and whisked our wasted hero away, and al,
alee, and myself were in charge of the remaining hounds. we brought them
back to the hotel, and left about 30 minutes later.
SUNDAY 7am
al (AKA the alarm clock) brought us from the depths of slumber to
inform us that the show was in an hour, and that we needed to mosey on out.
we headed to the show with cammisa leading the way. when i got to the autoX
section (which is what i was signed up for), i asked if it was possible if i
could just bring my car into the show area and leave it parked there, since
i intended not to run the track. i was told no, and left it at that. less
than an hour later, alee found me and told me that i had the option of
entering the show under the guise of one peter lyndvall (i hope that that
was the proper spelling - thanks for the hook-up guy!!!)
i locked my dirty, garbage-filled rocco there while i ran around
checking out the sites. really cool. i bumped into a lot
of people from the hotel, and their usual question was : "how's your buddy?"
i didn't have the heart to tell them that he died, so i wisely stated that
he was getting his stomach pumped at the hospital. in any case, sometime in
the afternoon, the booze hounds made their entrance, and king joker that he
is, kev showed up in his hospital gown!
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/14sickboy.jpg) with all
of the
electordes or whatever still connected to his body
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/15nicenipple.jpg). what a
joker...
my fave cars of the day were (not in any particular order:
1. a white mk2 golf with flat green rims, completely dialed down coilovers,
*full* roll cage, sparco driver's seat and a 16V motor that was pumping
about 185or so hp.
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/16dumpedtourer.jpg)
2. adrenaline motorsports' 1.8T mk1 rocco (SO clean) - i will do my best to
have one ASAP (http://www.vwguys.com/Images/WaterFest2000/DSC00006.jpg)
3. alee's GTI
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/01aleesGTI.jpg) (the very
car that made me fall in love with
VWs still has it
4. kevin black's 11.9sec 1/4 mile runnin mad mk1 rocco
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/19madmk1turbo.jpg)
5. dumped green G60 corrado
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/20greenG60.jpg)
6. super clean pearl audi blue G60 mk2 golf
7. some crazy blue mk2 jetta
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/22bluedevil.jpg) (i won't
even go into descriptions,
this car was mad)
the ms. waterfest was pretty bad IMHO. seeing the girls up there
did absolutely 0 for me and jimmy. not to say that they were
unattractive...they just looked so uncomfortable. oh well. freed up some
space in the lot for pictures, so i guess that it was good that they had the
event...
i want to make mention that my man adam nailed another first place
for the day in his beautiful 92 fox
(http://www.lunaticfringe.org/vwot/members/AdamB.html). written off by some
tit who
doesn't know how to drive, adam resurrected his baby from the near-death
state into a sweet sweet ride. everytime he passes me on the highway i
snap. i love that damn car.
near the end of the show, the EIP mk3 turbo VR6 golf showed up
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/24EIPturbomk3.jpg),
making all sorts of noise. the big dude driving it got out, did whatever he
had to do, apparently went one lap of the autoX track, and headed out. wow.
i was certainly impressed. can you tell?
one thing that i didn't do was watch the autoX. i hear that it was
really quite exciting, but i just couldn't get into it.
at the end of the show, we swapped out the rear motor mount in
alee's GTI . took about 30 minutes from beginning to end, with only a few
interruptions, like scott in the aforementioned 1.8T passat doing his
patented crazy-ass burnout across the lot. apparently he had swapped the
front tires from the back to the front and vice versa. i believe it, he
made some pretty retardedly long marks around town. he is my idol.
the VWoT people and angie and marco finally did the japanese thing,
as we had planned the night before. of course, i was to lead the way, which
was a bloody disaster. so, when we realized that i couldn't find my way out
of an open door, alee told me which way to go. and sho nuff, we got to
where we wuz going. she rocks.
after dinner, we head back to the hotel. i have a shower, and as
soon as i get out, alee, damian, and adam are unconscious. it was only 9
oclock! how weak :). so i went outside to see what else was going down,
and i met up with the rochester and the west coast crew. jim was trying to
take the oil filter off his car, but was not having a good time of it. i
think that someone must've locktited the damn thing on there, cuz it did not
want to move. we eventually loosened it up, and let jimmy do the dirty
work. i was sitting in my car, and my man tony from maine wanted to go for
a spin. so, we blasted out for about 5 minutes, and then relaxed with
everyone for awhile. we sat around talking about what we looked for in our
internet porn, small vs. large brakes, racing, racing, racing, and racing.
then, strangely enuff, me and van sprewenknob raced.
we didn't really have much to choose from as far as safe places to
race are concerned, but we made what we could of the hotel parking lot. the
first 2 races were witnessed only by brett and myself, and the last race was
covered by CNN (cammisa national news). who won? i think that i did. even
if brett had room to stretch his legs, i don't think that he would've had
enough to pull on me...even on the highway. i guess we'll find out in TO,
huh, brett? i'm drooling at the prospect of doing a full-out 5th gear run
on the 407, baby...
so, we hung out for a bit, and i gotta tell ya, tony pelltier is the
fucking bomb. that kid had me laffing so hard i fell. motherfucker. can't
wait to hear the stories next year, guy! you better have yourself a 1.8T in
something....
MONDAY morning
the VWoT and the momentum folks all headed to that restaurant where
the waiter remembers everything. the food was good once again, and the
conversation was even better. we made out from there and promptly hit
traffic. i think that we waited for a good hour before we got moving
again.when we did, we made some good time. one point in particular that i
recall is coming down one of the mountain strips doing 200 (124mph) right
into a pack of hard-braking cars. apparently some dude went off the side of
the super well-maintained 4-lane highway. that sucked. so we pulled over
for about 2 minutes to fix a littel something on my car, and started up just
in time to drive blindly through a surprise cats-and-dogs downpour. it was
insane. i could see nothing at all, and was just a little nervous that i'd
end up rear-ended or underneath some cats' rear bumper. the rain promptly
passed, and that sort of thing happened probably another 10 times along the
way, though not as intensely as the first time.
riley and tania, and their 2 dogs, came along with us up to toronto.
on the way, i was dying to settle some long-held disputes. so, we lined it
up a couple of times on highway 81 and the truth has been found. of course,
riley had tania, teh 2 dogs, and a trunk full of gear. however, i had my
heavy-ass stereo, my full tool collection, hydraulic jack, 2 spare wheels,
and all sorts of other knick-knacks in there.
we ran in fifth, and we were side-by-side thru the whole thing. in
fourth, i pulled on him slowly. then, a little later on, we tried it from
third. riley, the sneaky little bugger, tricked me into upshifting into
fourth, then jumped on it when i wasn't ready. so, i jammed third again,
wound it out to 7000, nailed fourth, passed him, and gave him fifth for good
measure. riley, i await your response. (it'll be a couple of days yet,
since he and tania are still somewhere in ontario, and have at least another
4 days of travelling ahead of them.
at one point on the trip, we were all booking along at between
170-200(100-120mph) when we crested a hill and started heading down another.
i saw a couple of cars on the side of the road up ahead, but one of them was
red and the other was black. of course, as we got closer, i sawe that the
second car was a camaro...with sirens and lights on the top. SHIT! i
forgot that the police drive black cars in NY, not white ones like in
ontario. i jammed the brakes, and hoped that he had been in the middle of
giving the other car a ticket, but he unfortunately had already got back in
and turned his gun on again. before i say who got pulled over, i want to
say what order the lot of us were in: al/todd in the GTI******, adam in his
show-winning fox (http://www.lunaticfringe.org/vwot/members/AdamB.html),
colin/erica in their bimmer 325,
riley/tania in the mk2 rocco
(http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Garage/5016/scir2/redsnow2lg.JPG) (the
weather was kind of all over the place), me in the sic rocco
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/29sicrocco.jpg), and
alee/damian in the GTI
(http://members.home.net/the-mad-bastard/sicrocco/01aleesGTI.jpg).
right, so who got busted? none other than colin and riley. now
THAT is fucked up. i'm not going to argue, cuz i got away with nothing but
an increased heart rate. but i think that that is just nutty. colin got 93
in a 65, and riley got 89 n a 65. not bad, kids. the best part was that
riley had been busted already the week before in ohio for 89 in a 65, and as
a result, he didn't have his licence on him, cuz the cop forgot to give it
back. so the officer asked him for the old ticket instead! hehe.
consistency is the key, my friend.
the rest of us kept going until we hit a rest stop, and waited for
the 2 criminals to catch up. colin was relegated to passenger status, while
riley just didn't care, cuz he knows that he is never going to be heading
back to NY anytime in the next decade, so he kept his top-speed antics
going. i like riley. you may be thinking that because erica took over,
that she was going to drive slow...no way. she's as bad as alee, and had
that thing flowing along with us at 140 the whole way.
one last incident came along and bit us in the ass again. it was a
little fuelling problem in my rocco. apparently, you need gas to operate a
motor vehicle? well, no one told me, cuz i went and ran out AGAIN! the
stoopid gas guage lied to me, i'm telling you! anyways, we made our way
thru that one and headed back up. we hung out in kingston for a bit for
some grub, and blasted back down to TO.
all in all, it was a fantastic time. if anyone reading this has
ever thought about going to waterfest but couldn't see a point in going,
then let me stress to you that this show is the best we have in north
america. the people rock, and the cars are awesome. what more do you need?
come on down in 2001, you won't regret it.
jason
the mad bastard
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