You can expect few things to happen when "Super Street" sends out a call for a car meet. Traffic: obvious (it’s Los Angeles). Sweet venue: duh (the Petersen Automotive Museum). Some of the best Japanese builds from Southern California: (c)heck yeah. Piss off the locals: double, triple, quadruple check. But would you expect anything less? Of course not.
Taking over multiple levels of the museum’s parking structure was the 2017 edition of the Super Street Cruise-In & Tech Day presented by Turn 14 Distribution. Though the event was originally centered around bringing car enthusiasts together while tech inspections for Formula Drift competition cars were going on, it’s since evolved to the point where a) more space was needed, and b) people just want to get together no matter what’s going on as long as cool cars are involved. And so, the name stuck.
As you can imagine, getting to the museum itself was a bit of a nightmare. Sundays in LA are no walk in the park, and with street closures surrounding the museum, even my knowledge of dipping through side streets didn’t help. But we all managed to get in eventually for an awesome morning that rivals some of the best Cars & Coffee events, especially if you’re into modern and classic modified Japanese cars.
Most models from the Japanese automotive spectrum were there and from a variety of generations, for example:
Love Skylines? So do we — from the original Hakosuka coupe to the world renowned R34 and up to the R35 were there. Honda fan like me? If you looked carefully, there were some ‘90s-styled DA Integras up top along with some JDM-inspired builds with rare Mugen or Spoon bolt-ons. Sprinkled throughout were even more obscurities, like a SW20-generation MR2, the actual movie car S2000 from “2 Fast 2 Furious” and several others that had been restored to their original factory condition (or as close to it as possible).
The crowd mellowed out about three quarters of the way through the meet, so if you were waiting a long time to get in, our word of advice for future events: Let a couple of hours go by first instead of waiting those hours to get in. But that madness is what makes these kind of gigs so much fun and exciting, kind of like trying to get into your favorite nightclub. If it were that easy to get in, you probably wouldn’t do it in the first place. And with "Super Street" involved, everyone wants to be part of the cool kid crowd.
