Silverstone Circuit, Towcester, NN12 8TN
Our first car show of the year, we headed to Japfest 2023 at Silverstone Circuit with East Coast Japanese (“ECJ”), a JDM car club based around the Colchester/Ipswich area. We have been to many of ECJ’s car and coffee meets at the Ipswich Aviation Heritage Museum so we knew the club was a friendly, welcoming club to go to a show with.
It was a fairly early 5:30am start, meeting friends at a local Shell garage closer to home to convoy to Silverstone. It was my first time showcasing a recent change to my own car, having the Varis livery applied to match the Varis bodykit my car has. Shout out to Violent-D for doing the incredible livery (copying from photos on other cars and keeping my colour scheme in it).
We joined the queue at Silverstone around 7am, surrounded by some amazing builds that people have been working on over the winter, ready for the 2023 show season. I wish I had taken more photos after we joined the queue but I didn’t manage to.
This year, the layout of the Japfest show was slightly different. The trade market was on the outside of the track, just before the tunnel entrance with club stand being the same side too.
There were still club stands on the inside of the track but rather than being on the bridge entrance side, it was on the tunnel entrance side as Silverstone has decided to build a go-kart track in the empty grass area inside the track.
I actually quite liked this layout, I supposed because it is different to the past 7 years that I have been attending the show.
The weather when we arrived was a bit concerning…it was cold, cloudy and damp. But after an hour or so of being on the club stand, the sun came out and graced us with its presence for the rest of the day.
Below are some photos I managed to capture from the day, including a super-charged Mitsubishi Evo that looked insane!
