It’s nice to meet loads of people along the road when you’re out there shooting. Some of the people come over and ask you to e-mail the photos to them others compliment you on your work or they come over and say: He you’re that guy from… (wherever they think your from). I must say that definitely last year I experienced more of these situations. I first met Mick van Randeraat earlier this year at one of the promotional meetings for DMPD2013. Our conversation started with one of those shouts about one of my photographs. And I’ll have to admit that when I randomly captured Mick in action on the Zandvoort circuit I had no clue of who he was or how he looked like. Just another guy going sideways.
As soon as he noticed that I was ‘that’ guy from ‘that’ photo it all kind of started. I was happy to be complimented and he was happy to have a cool photo of his car. I started following Mick’s whereabouts in the drift scene and found out he was quite the talented guy behind the wheel of his Sil80. So after a few meetings here and there I wanted to follow him for a day to shoot him while he was drifting during some tracksessions at the Zandvoort circuit.
On the 29th of june I drove to the coast to meet up with him and this time he brought his ‘new’ chassis. More power, more potential, same style and same driver. This season Mick will burn rubber in his new RB25DET powered Nissan S14.5.
As I arrived I saw Mick’s crew buddies, Jeroen Hakze and Bop Westerduin, fixing the last bits and pieces to the car and solving some breaking problems.
I was kind of surprised to see my fellow roadster driver Bop with Mick as I had no idea that they were friends. Bop has will have some really amazing things going on with his Mazda in the near future but I’ll get back on that when the time is right.
When I took a first look at the car after some catching up with the guys, I thought to myself: Damn Inne and Michiel did it again. I don’t know how but Stickerdump managed to give this car the same exterior character and style as with the 2012 Sil80 of Mick. Perfect colour combination!
So I decided to give the s14.5 that Wangan Warriors finishing touch with a few of our clublogos and url stickers.
The cool thing about these drift chassis is that they always have some kind of raw character. No comfort, no clean finishing touches and such. “Does it work? Yes. Okay let’s go sideways with the damn thing” kind of mentality.
Since Mick was at CPZ to test the new engine and feel of the car he decided to buy a few sessions and get on the track as soon as possible. We were done with our little preview shoot at the parkinglot so I made my way to the track as well.
I was kind of disappointed because I forgot my telephoto lens and shooting trackside I really missed that tool. Nevertheless I got to shoot wide angle penningshots and tried to lower my shutterspeed as much as possible. I need more practice though!
Inbetween the sessions we lingered around on the paddock area, enjoyed the weather and the sounds of cars on the track. I’ve got to say it was a relaxing day an the weather turned out to be better than I expected.
My fellow Wangan Warrior Kevin ran into some trouble with his gearbox so after a few tracksessions wich he drove for I-race, he had to stop driving. Fotunately the gearbox problems were quickly solved so you’ll see Kevin in action again pretty soon.
On the paddock I came across this Levin. I’ve got to say that I was amazed by this project and how clean this beautifull classic looked. Allthough I’ve saw it before on the internet I wasn’t aware of the Beams engine underneath the bonnet.
My compliments to the owner for all the detail work on it, it’s really one of a kind if you ask me. I handed on of our Like cards to the owner so hopefully he’ll find his way to the website!
Here is how it looks like in its completeness. Makes you want to hug it right?
As Mick was having a short chat with the owner about this project, our day was slowly coming to an end.
I had the intention of going into details a little bit further but since the S14.5 isn’t completely done and this wasn’t a complete photoshoot of te car, we’re going to wait a little while with that untill the time is right. I will combine a complete feature of Mick’s car with his head sponsor Granuband in a future blog post. In this post I will tell you a little bit more about Mick and his future plans and we will take a closer look at what his sponsor does.
It’s nice to see large companies like this support young upcoming drifters. And since Mick has only one season of drifting under his belt, I can tell that his plans for the future sound promissing. But as I said we will get in to detail on that in a future post! This is not the last you’ve seen of Mick on our blog.
I wanted to thank Mick and his crew for their time and I hope you and your sponsor appreciate this preview blog. We’ll meet soon!
Drift safe!
-Rens Adams
www.granuband.nl
https://www.facebook.com/GranubandDrift