2020 Final Bout Special Stage West (SSW)

It’s Day XX of Covid-19 Quarantine in Houston… photography freelance gigs have come to a halt and so has weddings… hopefully it doesn’t go on for another 4 months or else things will get tight. Definitely looking forward to going out and producing stuff again. Now lets take a look back at the last event before the Quarantine of 2020… 2020 Final Bout Special Stage West (SSW)…

2020 Final Bout Special Stage West – An Isolated Event

Final Bout SSW took place at the Horsethief Mile in Willow Springs Raceway… about 1 hr away from DTLA. I flew in the night before so I missed all the pre Final Bout meet festivities. I actually considered on canceling this trip since this was the weekend things started to shut down… but I bought tickets that were non refundable… sooo if I get Coronavirus, I get Coronavirus… lol. I was actually more worried about getting stuck in California because that would’ve been one expensive trip…

Proceed to one’s dreams of a better place….

I had to pack pretty light for this trip so I didn’t bring too much gear or extra clothes… I thought it would be around 60F feeling like 70F but nope. When its 50F it feels like 40F in the desert. All I had on was a light nylon rain coat. It kinda sucked lol.

Ryo and Mush’s FC RX7s from Team Sexy Knights… I had contacted Mush after the event and let him use some of the Final Bout SSW photos for an article in Drift Tengoku….

Tbh I wasn’t around in the scene when this FD RX7 at the Apexi booth was drifting in competitions… It really does look like something from the mid 2000s drifting era.

I walked around the pits a bit and spotted this Chevy Silverado with TE’s…

And a Toyota Tacoma on mag blue TE37’s…

This was the pit area for Final Bout SSW. Somewhat full of cars but no spectators were allowed because of the Coronavirus…

Super clean Datsun 510?

The Horsethief Mile was a small track inside of Willow Springs Raceway. It consists of of a high speed elevated entry into a hairpin then down about 1/8 mile to another hair pin and then another elevation change… Looks like one of the most fun tracks to drift on tbh… but that 2nd downhill to the 2nd hairpin seems to be where everyone goes off…

See what I mean… Daniel Baxter here is pushing this S13 liftback onto the track…

Media Attendance was the main spectators of the event… Here you see Joey Lee of Stickydiljoe The Chronicles and Ryan Der with this pink 35mm film camera…

While teams were doing test and tune runs, the Apexi FD RX7 made a run… I was looking forward to it drifting but it just made a lap around the track twice…

When you shoot as media at Final Bout, you actually need a spotter to watch out for things coming at you while you shoot… I unfortunately didn’t have one but just don’t stand at the exits of entries and use common sense…

Before the team competition starts, the teams gather at the main track area, and spectators would walk around to checkout the cars. It was very empty at SSW, but it was all fun and a sense of closeness with everyone…