A day out of the office: Garage-D

A few of you may or may not know that my canary yellow Nissan PS13 Silvia isn’t really a drift car at all – it’s very much a track car focused on getting round the Nordschleife as quickly as possible – but it just happens to have lots of lock if the mood takes me. However on a recent trip with a group of Mazdas from Mazda on Track and Driftworks the engine blew. It was a coincidental component failure, but it gave me an excuse the get the engine forged so that I could really have some fun…

The car in my ownership has only been to one place to be serviced and upgraded, and that is the wonderful world of Garage-D, Watford. I’ll save the build blog post of my car for another time, but let me show you where the car has spent it’s last couple of months as the place itself is a hugely busy and fascinating place full of the weird and wacky, plus some very serious machinery.

Garage-D is run and owned by Julian Smith who is still regarded as one of the best drifters in Europe, despite having been out of competition for three years now to focus on building the Garage-D empire. Walton Smith is Julians brother, and an equally respected drift driver and an extremely competent mechanic. They both work almost every day, and carry an absolutely huge range of rare new and used JDM goodies for popular, and unusual cars.

This is Julians completely rust free mint condition AE86 – the number one rule is don’t touch the car, hence me not shutting the bonnet for him. That WILL bug him. 😀 Garage-D’s car park has about 25-30 cars in it, all amazing in their own little way.

Sil-Eightys, GTR’s, Stageas, Mantas, Corollas, my old R32…

Yes? Yes.

This BMW 320 Touring belongs to John Marcar, my pal who slogged me back from DWHQ to Garage-D to pick the car up – It’s got lots of Khumo Cup goodies underneath, and will be rolling very soon on a set of genuine Rays racing wheels which look awesome.

Even the Apprentice Kirk drives a sick car – this very capable 318iS rips it up good and hard – and representing Driftworks!

This C34 Laurel is just basically amazingly cool. Straight out of Ebisu and the summer drift festival, this thing is so cool it has to win prizes!

Julians personal car is the ex-Nomura Blitz R34, currently running some retarded drag engine.

Garage-D isn’t all about drift though, track and road cars make up a very large percentage of his business, this R34 GTR is going to receive a crazy Nitto engine which Julian is now the exclusive European dealer of.

Inside another 700bhp GTR gets another new gearbox after melting two other ones. 😀

Walton Smith is a man who knows how to spanner, and a bloody nice bloke to boot.

Where as Eoin is a mental case, with metal teeth and liking for Defi’s. 😀

A genuine Alpina E30 M3 is getting the engine and box from an 850!

And finally, the Drift Kart – a bike engined monster designed to kill the rider at any available opportunity.

So there were go for now – Garage-D! Hopefully, we’re going to be getting a full blog from the boys on a regular basis soon, so you’ll be able to read about all this amazing machinery and what magic they work on the cars in more depth.

Want your car to be amazing? Visit Garage-D’s website and get your car booked in fools!