Life as we know it evolves, whether it’s our landscape of mountains, oceans or wildlife: everything must adapt to grow and conform to their surroundings. Our industry isn’t so different, and Northwest Nissans (NWN) saw this eventual change coming and decided to act while the iron was still hot.

Text by Josh Mackey Photography by Mike Bowen, David Hintze, Cameron Jurgensen and Kyle Pope

The name “Golden Gardens” might ring a bell to most people that have been to Pacific Northwest events enough over the past 10 years. It’s for that much time that NWN has held their annual spring at the legendary Seattle waterfront park. Things have changed since the first meets: more people started going, including more cars and more makes from other manufacturers. Evolution at its finest, you can’t stop it — you can only help to control it and push it in the right direction.

For 2012, Northwest Nissans decided to partner with Evergreen Speedway and NWMotiv.com to produce a new generation of their annual meet, called Nissan Fest. Everyone has questioned as to why it’s called Nissan Fest if all makes and models show up. A public vote was held on their forum to decide a new name and by majority, “Nissan Fest” won. But the real question is, does it really matter?

Maybe it was luck or just pure coincidence, but the weather actually held up for a very early spring event and held itself for the entire day. 70 cars packed in at the Showcase car show and roughly 25 drifters hit the track for what turned out to be a really fun event. Those of us who ran the show were so busy that we almost totally forgot about the few thousand cars that came in throughout the day for annual meet, nearly filling the grass lot across the street!

We’re excited to see this new event take off and can rest assured that any kinks will be worked out next year! To those that came, thank you for your support and we hope our collaboration will just continue!

Drift Winners:

Pro Driver – Mike Phillips
Pro-Am Driver – Rob Primo
Best Tandem Drift – Joseph Lin & Chris Uhl
Best Single Drift – Matt Vankirk

Showcase Winners:

Best Bike – Thuc Nguyen – 2008 Ducati 848
Best Domestic – Trevor Pape – 2001 Pontiac Firebird
Best Toyota/Scion/Lexus – Kenji Nishimura – 1999 Lexus GS300
Best Euro – Drew Staudacher – 2002 BMW M3
Best Honda/Acura – Terry Suvonnarith – 2001 Acura Integra
Best Mitsubishi – TJ Phompanya – 2006 Mitsubishi Evo
Best Other – Marcus Estill – 2004 Hyundai Tiburon
Best Subaru – Erich Breitkreutz – 2004 Subaru Impreza
Best Infiniti – Andrew Le – 2006 Infiniti G35
Best 4dr Nissan – Nate Jellen – 2006 Nissan Armada
Best 2dr Nissan – Andrew Hohagen – 1992 Nissan Sentra
Best 240 Nissan – Cassie Tresl – 1990 Nissan 240SX
Editors Choice – Randy Olivarez – 2007 Honda S2000
Best of Show – Felix Yuen – 2007 Honda Fit

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