Mazda

With winter just around the corner Chop Shop decided to send the 2011 season off properly with a charity BBQ (proceeds to the Canadian Cancer Society and the Food bank) called Oktoberfest. The somewhat unseasonably nice weather lead to a great turn out and because this wasn't a show the atmosphere was super laid back which made it a great way to kill a couple of hours on a fall day.

With all of the awesome cars I share here dedicating an entire post to my own ride almost seems out of place. It's not the lowest or most aggressive Mazda 3 but I've received far more compliments on it this year than any other and my previous sunk setup was well received so what the heck. Big thanks to Steve at Square Peg Images for picking up my slack and shooting my car for me, if he didn't take these pics I probably would have never got around to doing it this year.

On Sunday afternoon I was lucky enough to have the owner of this car take some time out of his Thanksgiving weekend to shot some photos and video of my car. While he was working hard I was rolling around on my BMX, tweeting, and uploading photos of our cars to facebook. Several of people seemed pretty into Steve's Phantom Purple 3 on freshly refinished BBS RS wheels so here's a better look at the car as it currently sits.

When I first saw photos of this car I thought perhaps someone had crossed a Chevette with a Pacer and stuffed a big intercooler into the front of it. But after a quick search I learned that it is a 1977 Mazda 323, or Great Little Car as it was apparently called in North America. Before coming across this particular one (which looks to have a boosted spinning Dorito power plant under the hood) I never really had a reason to look into these.

So my friend Josh is to thank blame for today's Theme Tuesday. I actually had a different one 90% complete then we got talking about the Fast and The Furious franchise and next thing you know I am spending my lunch hour collecting images of the cars I liked from all of the movies. This list is probably a little different than Josh thought it would turn out because my 'classic American cars are awesome' bias is clearly showing for a good portion of this post.

Tucson native Will Watrous has once again graced Stance Is Everything with an awesome set of photos from the West Coast Nationals. It's been a little bit since I had heard from Will so it was good to see that he's still riding low and hitting up events in his Ranger. The WCN coverage he sent over this year looks just as good, if not better than last year, so if I ever do somehow get a travel budget WCN is an event I must attend.

The last round of CSCS passing means that a lot of the cars in today's post will be tucked away for the winter very soon. A few might make their way to Importfest Montreal but the rest will either be converted back to winter mode, stored, or go under the knife for rebuilds. With that in mind I made sure to do a few laps of the show and shine Sunday just to make sure I got some photos of some of the more attention grabbing cars

I've been told several times that H20i is an event I need to attend at least once. This year Mike and Jay from Stance Factory offered me a spot where they were staying for weekend and had it not been for some good friends of mine getting married I would have been there enjoying the festivities. However friends/family > cars so like Wekfest and Waterfest I've pulled together some photos that stood out to me in the hour or so I spent last night looking through coverage on various forums.

Nextmod decided to be patient this year and hold their BBQ a little later than they had previous years. This patience was rewarded with a stellar turnout (as always) with the quality and quantity of cars coming out rivalling a lot of the local parking lot shows in the area. Everyone knows these BBQs are a good time because what can really go wrong when you've got great weather, great cars and free food?

Summer sure flew by pretty damn fast, the first Stretch and Poke meet of the year doesn't even seem like it was all that long ago and now the last one for this season has come and gone. Though I was only at this season-ender event briefly I was there long enough to see that the community is appreciative of all of Dave's efforts and showed that by the great turn out.

I mentioned last week that Sunday September 11th was a busy day to be a car enthusiast here in Toronto. Conveniently the two events were close enough (about thirty minutes apart) that you didn't really have to make a choice between the two if you were only a spectator like myself. The first event I attended (and returned to) was the Battleground Show N' Shine put on by Battleground Performance and Division R.

Is there such thing as a car show hangover? If so that is what I have after this years Importfest Toronto. This has always been a show that people look forward too but I felt as though this year people were anticipating it even more than usual. I think the increased amount of anticipation was due to the hard work the Ifest team put in beforehand promoting the show online and at events, as well as the announcement of several 'feature' cars coming to the show from both within the GTA area and abroad.