Beast Coast Presents - The Collective
Photos: Tj Sanethong Author: Tj Sanethong
Prelude:
Beast Coast has been around for quite a long time. I’m not entirely sure to when they were established, but I do know that I was paying attention to them when I was putting my first car together. To put that time frame into perspective, that build was 10 years ago. Around the time they popped up, local meets hosted by Masstuning, Black Japan, and HONE hard park meets to name a few were giants in the community. These meets allowed everyone in, i mean it was for the community to enjoy and it was a great way to market your brand so why not. Beast coast took a different approach and did something that the best shows did. They created an invite only meet.
From what I’ve gathered the collective meet is the best of the best in the local area. Invites seem to be based on the quality of your build. Which in my opinion is the best way to showcase cars and it gives you a sense of gratification. It’s the stamp from those in the community that says “Hey you built something cool, come show it off with us” For years I’ve been working my way to building clean quality cars in hopes of one day I would get an invite to a show like this or get approved for a show similar to this (Wekfest, First Class Fitment). For those that don’t know, to build a car of that caliber requires time, patience, creativity but most importantly passion. No build is overnight at these events. Everything started as a vision, planned precisely to ensure it stayed on track during the process, and executed to the highest degree to ensure the best quality.
Golden Ticket:
Do I think we deserve the spot? I’m not entirely sure yet. We’ve been working hard at trying to keep Shelly’s build as clean as possible, with as much of her style as possible without dipping into the mediocre stuff. Everything that’s been done to the car has been done right, has been done as clean as possible, but because I am my own worse critic I don’t think its there yet.
Now you’re probably wondering, “Well how the heck did you get in there?” Fortunately enough we have lots of friends in the industry. It originally started with a text message from the homie billy that wanted to meet up since he would be in town. He never comes out this way so I had to ask what he was there for, I mean the food is good here but not worth driving an hour and some change for. He proceeds to tell me that there’s a private meet going on that night. In my mind I wasn’t thinking about The Collective Meet simply because I lost hope in attending years ago. We had a conversation about it and says “ Hey you want to go? Send me a picture of Shellys car, I’ll see if they approve it”
Now what I wasn’t aware of was that if your car is cool enough, you could get it approved by the people running it. I ended up falling asleep because it was 1:30 in the morning and I had no business being up any later. Woke up in the morning, no reply back. I figured eh we didn’t get in, as soon as i played that thought in my head my phone lights up 3 times. It was a picture of the flyer, and the direct message including the time and location of the event followed by “ Here’s the after meet on the bottom, you’re in”. At this point i’m stoked and went straight to detailing the car. While that was happening another friend of ours Aaron, sends us an invite to the event as well, so regardless if we sent in a request we would’ve gotten an invite.
Double Parking:
So since we weren’t able to bring anyone else along for the ride we rolled up by ourselves. We initially tried to meetup with Billy but that didn’t work out since they were on foot. We drove around Chinatown and found our way to meet up with Aaron who just so happened to be waiting for his friends to roll into the meet together. We didn’t have to wait too long, as they started to roll in as we were parking. Now if you’ve ever been to Chinatown you probably know where we were. Its the largest one way street in the area that’s known to spot some of the coolest jdm spec cars. Not every night is like this, but when its warm out and there’s a need for Gong Cha, you can find them there.
Within a few minutes it was already time to roll out. Because I’ve never been here before I assumed that it would be a bit of a cruise before we got there and I didn’t bother plugging it into the GPS since I was following Aaron. Turns out it wasn’t that far at all, it was hidden in plain sight if anything. The entire time rolling in I kept getting Tokyo Extreme Racer vibes. It was real chill rolling in, no unnecessary noise, no crazy loud music, nothing. People just rolled in parked, met up with some friends and just kicked it.
The variety of cars that showed up ranged from stance, to functional, old school, new school etc. Whatever flavor you were into, there was at least one car there for you. The very small but very cool low rider crowd started to make their appearance at shows like this. Its always been a treat for me to see low riders, it was the first style of custom cars that totally ruined my life. (In a good way)
The stance cars have been more speed lately. If anyone reading this knows me, they know that for a long time I was against stance. I later figured out that I actually hated the stance scene, I wasn’t accepting the low quality stance cars that started to over saturate the scene at the time (2012-2015). As it starts to get refined, I started to really enjoy some of the examples below.
Now this is where I started to geek out a bit. It’s no secret that drifting has my heart down to the core. Some of the coolest street cars showed up to give everyone examples of what a proper period correct Japanese style setup looks like. Zach Foss brought his Jz powered Fc3s sporting my favorite Re-Amemiya FC 2000 bumper parked next to a very period correct FC3S rocking Yokohama Super Advans.
I also bumped into an old friend Corey Clark who brought out his s13 hatch. He’s had this car for well over 15 years and it just keeps getting better. Rocking a set of rare staggered set of Kosei k1’s with a unique M sport aero setup. Maybe I’ll do a feature in the future of this car.
To follow the trend Kevin Phan rolled in with his plum s13 hatch. I’ve looked to the Bosstown guys for lots of inspiration with my builds even if they weren’t S-chassis’s. Kevin just came back from the Wisconsin for Final Bout and it definitely showed. My favorite thing about his car are the battle scars, while a clean car is great to have, having some battle scars on a drift gives it character. Now there’s a fine line, you cant total a car and call it a battle scar.
The homie Billy who put us on to the show brought his blob eye out. I’ve watched this car transform numerous times before reaching this point and It’s a hard setup to change. The car continues to get better as it goes, I’m not sure what he has next but im positive it’ll fit the car very well. Huge shout out to you for putting us on.
As you can already tell by some of the photos, it was a great time and i’d love to attend this event as many times as I can. I wasn’t able to capture all the cars for various reasons, one of them being the pictures just weren’t clear. So If I didn’t get your car I apologize for that and i’ll be more prepared next time around.
Extra:
The team behind The Crate has been working extremely hard behind the scenes conjuring up some awesome things for the near future. I will announce that we do have merchandise being made as we speak and will be releasing soon. We will only be doing sales in person for the first wave, and that should be around the end of the month. Here’s where you can buy the merch, click on the hyper link for more information.
Broke East Meet
Until next time, have a fantastic day thank you for all the love and support every bit of it is appreciated. Remember to follow us on social media, Like, Comment, Subscribe and please share this with all your friends and family. Aloha yall
