LZ World Tour Ireland
Drifting. It’s fair to say that, here at Auto Finesse, we like it. A lot. In fact, anyone who follows our social media channels or has dropped by to see us this season, at just about any event in the UK and Europe, will have gathered that we’ve seriously got the tyre destroying bug of late.
We’ve taken on the drift arena at Gravity, drifted Silverstone at Ford Fair and even built the world’s cleanest drift car - our 2-JZ powered LTO BMW E36 - to debut at Ultrace in Poland. So, when we saw that the mighty LZ World Tour was, once again, going to be landing at Mondello Park, Ireland for the European stage of its tour, there was no way that we weren’t going to be there to get involved in all the action.
Conceived by Youtuber and drifter extraordinaire, Adam LZ, the tour has already hit Canada, Australia and his home country, the US, this year. But it’s safe to say that Ireland is one of the biggest and best events on the calendar because it brings with it all the best drivers. After all, Ireland is the home of drifting here in Europe. With a long an illustrious history of Japanese imports landing at the Irish ports first, and many of the best cars staying right there in Ireland, it’s easy to see why drifting culture been so strong there over the past three or four decades.
Anyway, speaking of ports, all we had to do was hook up the AirStream pop-up store, cram it with a full range of the world’s best detailing products and head up to Holyhead in convoy with our duo of top drift cars. Then a short hop across the water to Dublin and a quick set-up ready to get out there for a Friday of full-on practice, breaking stuff, fixing stuff, and more practice. It doesn’t get any better than that, right?
With 24 of the top drivers, plenty of the big names from all around the world including our own Finesse Racing driver Archie Harmer, we were set for loads of top action all weekend. From the event qualifying on Saturday to the final battles on Sunday we had a blast every inch of the way.
There’s were few interesting, some might say off-the-wall, features this year, too. Not only did all the pro drifters compete in a series of runs and head-to-head battles over the course of the weekend, but they had to take on battles in a pair of stock Lexus IS200s – a real test of their skills there for sure.
If that wasn’t enough there was also a whole load of demos including the D1 Legends, James Deane’s 4-Rotor RX7 and D-Mac’s Audi Quattro, and even a ‘Star In A Reasonably Priced NASCAR’ demo. Yes, it was just as crazy as it sounds, the entertainment value was off the scale all weekend.
And it wasn’t just the pro drifters out in force, our very own founder, James, was invited along for some special demos in our Live To Offend BMW E36.
This one may not be the easiest to drive, but it definitely whips the crowd up into a frenzy. After all, it’s not too often you get to see a full-on drift car that’s put together and detailed like a no-expense-spared show car get abused on the limit like this. Then again, that’s exactly what it’s built for, and James was certainly making the most of the track time, not to mention our stockpile of tyres!
Aside from the drifting itself, a great static show has built up around the track action over the past couple of years here, starting with the LZ Festival back in 2022. And it’s safe to say that, with over 700 turning up for the event this time, there were plenty of top cars on display and dressed to impress all around Mondello Park. It’s not just drift cars, either. There was all sorts of epic machinery to check out, spread around the venue, making it easily one of Ireland’s biggest cars shows.
Obviously, we can’t show them all, but here’s a few of our absolute favourites…
So, did we win? Well, not this time. Did we have an amazing time though? Oh yes! And that’s what drifting is all about. Suffice to say that we just can’t wait to get both of our tarmac destroying monsters out as again as soon as humanly possible. When you’ve got the bug, you’ve got the bug!
For more info on the LZ World Tour, especially if you’d like to get involved next year, you can check out the official LZ World Tour Website. And, for more top event reports, be sure to stop by the Behind The Scenes Section Of Our Blog, too.
