Most of you guys might not know me so before I will serve you some footage of the, in my opinion, best car related gathering of the year, please let me introduce myself first:
My name is Patrick, but most of my friends call me ‘Palle’. I live in western Germany and I work as an editor and photographer for German car related magazines like „Chrom & Flammen“, „BMW-Scene“, „Porsche-Scene“, „VW-Scene“ and some others. But work is work, and besides this, my personal preferences have always been tended towards the Japanese car lifestyle.
Enough on the introduction, time for some road trippin’! Above you can see my car, I bought it bone stock a few weeks ago and my personal target was to make it look acceptable for DMPD at the beautiful ENKA factory in Ede. In fact, I was done with it on Thursday evening before the event but that should not be the main topic of this post. So I packed my bags and headed out at around 2 PM on Friday.
I met up with some friends of mine which, just as myself, got selected for the indoor area.
After 3 hours of driving we arrived at the hotel where we checked in and went to the restaurant for some food. After that we decided to check out what was going on at the pre-meet outside. We stayed there until we recognised that the rain wouldn’t stop so we went up in our rooms to get some sleep.
We headed out very early on Saturday to get our cars to the ENKA factory and it seemed like we were not the only ones who had the idea to get up early!
The cars were clean and safe at the indoor area so we went back to the hotel to get some breakfast.
When we got back just one hour after we left the factory, the area filled up so fast that we thought we stayed away for the half of the day – and the rush did not stop so the queue reached the next main roads and jammed off property traffic!
If I had to describe the entire meet in one word it would be ‘superdopeandawesome’. The quality of the cars was just incredible as you can see on this mint oldschool 260Z…
…and this super clean S14!
Besides the load of new projects we also met some old acquaintances…
… and some cars that I have seen at the Japanese Autosport Festival earlier this year.
This Rocket Bunny Silvia has just parked across my own car so I can say that I had a really clean view every time I came back!
Even if I was not a big fan of Hondas until I got my sedan I have to admit that there were some really nice hatchbacks and that awesome S2K!
The long walk around made us hungry so my friends and I decided to get some food in the afternoon. And watch the B-Boys do their thing on the stage!
Looks like break dancing is a really exhausting thing!
After another walk around I got the honour to meet a few of my personal idols, Mr. Rod Chong, Paddy McGrath and some other Speedhunters.
DMPD was coming to an end but I took the chance to shoot the beautiful car of my mate Ibrahim for a new print magazine that my company is working at.
After that we set our sails towards a small town called Hilversum…
… where we met up with a fellow Wangan Warrior, Allard van Grafhorst.
We decided to stay overnight to visit the SXOC Meet in Utrecht on Sunday.
We met some of Allard’s friends and had a nice chat.
This is the last picture I would like to share with you. The past weekend was one of my personal favorites so far this year and I’m really looking forward to the next DMPD event and a good time writing and shooting for Wangan Warriors!
– Patrick Trießl