Hagerty Video: City INSIDE a Warehouse: Drift Games HQ in Dublin, Ireland & LZ World Tour | Capturing Car Culture

Hagerty Video Transcript

Laughs Thank you We traveled all the way to Ireland for the first stop of the LZ world tour at Mandela Park which is Ireland’s largest racetrack the event was put on by drift games and they host so many drift events all over Europe our friend Dave Egan is the founder of drift games and he has

Been the voice of European drifting for almost 10 years Dave and the crew worked really hard to put together the new drift Games headquarters and showroom we were the first people to actually check it out if you enjoy our YouTube videos and have been wondering how you can help support

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Find the link in the description below so first impression I’m not even miked up we literally just walked in here if you didn’t know this existed if you’re just a car Enthusiast that opens the door walks into this Warehouse you wouldn’t even know what to think like how is it that something like

This exists so crazy You have a bunch of 7-Eleven stuff here I’m surprised you didn’t make one of them a 7-Eleven we could have but the 7-Eleven isn’t something we have here and then also we have to have a bar if it’s an Irish garage so yeah of course

It was Adam O’Connor works for me and he loves like drinking pints again so we just said O’Connor this is really cool right here yeah like I I saw pictures of this place and a couple quick video clips but honestly none of that material does Justice when

You walk through that door which by the way the hallway and the steps totally inconspicuous does not give away anything that’s what we wanted because we don’t it’s not Public Access every day and we wanted to just see him on the outside like it was just an office block

Or something up here that people would almost go I know it’s up there but it can’t be up here yeah very nondescript pull up here a couple cars outside doesn’t really give away too much but when you walk up those stairs you open that door it looks like you walked from outside

Back to outside yeah that was the idea just went to Universal Studios once and saw a road that was painted like this and I went oh what if you just did that inside and then because Ireland rains all the time because it’s so difficult to shoot nice car content this whole

Place came from us having we still have a workshop separate to here which all the Dirty Work happens like the engines and the fiberglass and all that we said we want a showroom we want an office and we also want a studio and we also want nice lighting and then why don’t we

Do this and it’ll all just progress progress progress from one idea six months ago this didn’t even exist as a concept in this whole place and so in this configuration how long has it been like how long have you had it like this as it looks right now yes but

Seven hours that’s it like two weeks ago it was kind of finished but we were still putting finishing touches on it like this morning so we’re pretty much your first guess yep to see it actually completed the deadline was the LZ World Tour event because we knew everybody’d

Be in town but not even regardless of the publicity but you always have to have a deadline because if you don’t it’s like a project car just keeps going and going and going so I think it kind of motivated everybody who was building and helping us with it to get it done in

Time and then a lot of these ideas weren’t in the original plan they just kind of naturally progressed as we went through saying oh wouldn’t it be cool if we did this or wouldn’t it be cool if we did that I’ve just never seen anything

Like this the the cool thing to me is that this is your workspace you guys built like this cool little Starbucks uh inspiration little coffee shop no it’s nothing to do I don’t know where you got that impression from but you live you look outside of the window and it’s like

A street like an alley out of some dream car world you even have a gutter here so this is why this is here is actually a very not fun thing to talk about so this room this entire room that you’re in was a fridge so that’s why it’s super insulated so

This was actually a meat processing Factory so in this room there would have been tons of meat getting grinded up and this is actually to power wash all the blood off the floor so this now becomes Car Wash perfect because you can wash and it all goes out the side of the

Building I mean but this could be any road too like exactly it’s just like but the floor originally was red which is really horrible and then these were red so we painted everything and got it all that way but definitely like the ghosts of some cows we’re expecting we’re going

To hear at night here but it’s a definitely a really weird repurposing of a building so they took the idea of taking this huge building make it into eight different car businesses and then we took this space initially just a storage and obviously it escalated to being an

Office a shooting area and now sort of a workshop as well I mean it legitimately looks like a street yep there’s no question about it you have the brick you have the sidewalk you have the perfect Road markers you even have a crosswalk yeah and the guy Darren who built this

Uh that was said was one of the toughest things in here was to get the measurements all right for all of those line markings and the amazing thing is that the guy who built all this with my imagination his imagination he owns this car okay so this is uh uh nine and six

Yep with the old new kit this is not on the heat so he built it with me so you can see his imagination on cars he had a bit more than a regular contractor would have and then his son also works for me so that’s his son’s car so basically

These guys are we were like two Crews for a long time that we were always one opening each other building cars in Ireland like show cars and then it ended up that Craig came working for us because he’s 19 and he wanted to build like cars and do that stuff and then his

Dad was obviously interested in the project so we all car guys everything the electricians who did the floors everyone was a Drifter a car guy and that was their day job so they came here with a lot more love passion and Imagination than say someone you just

Hire off the street let’s check out your podcast Studio I may have tagged you already here you go for it that’s what this was for so what was the story behind oh Larry this is this is the fact that you’re covering this on your channel is is I’m

Losing a lot of bets here so Josh who’s our videographer I said we’re building this new place we need a podcast studio and I was thinking I was like oh all I’ve got to give you is like 2 000 year old make it happen and I thought he was

Gonna go get like wood and he’s gonna build a little room and then this thing arrives on the trailer I mean in the worst condition you can ever imagine spiders rust everything this might look like a cool patina to you but when we got it it was just abandoned in a hedge

It was like bad State he went then and took I think he bought it for a thousand Euro and he kitted it all out for a thousand Euro like built everything himself and again I get his point he’s like a room is a boring thing but this

Is kind of like an actual funny thing to look at we didn’t have to mind it like we dragged it in here so we cut the floor flat so that it would sit in the floor and then we took the engine out it actually had a five-cylinder Audi engine

In which we gave to Darren McNamara so he made some of the money back again we just put it together and said it’s in a funky cool little place and when we knew there would be a lot of people moving around you can just slide the door over

Have your conversation on the podcast it’s not like perfect but it’s again like everything here it’s 90 okay are you kidding me it’s so cool like there’s microphone set up the lighting is awesome the the fact that the steering wheel and the dash and everything is

Still in there yeah you know when I got inside I’m like this is so roomy you can actually have probably up to six people comfortably in there it’s not bad if you open the door too fast it hits the rear wheel and stuff but the idea what this

Was it was just a cool little because what’s actually behind there is a fridge door because we mentioned that it’s a refrigerator and there’s a 20-foot drop behind it so we were like do we trust that people let’s just not open that door and fall out so we said let’s put

This in the way and it just fit the area perfectly and I think the patina to me makes it look cooler and we put a few stickers on it we can give it a kick it doesn’t matter and it’s like a nice little I don’t know what everything

Being so shiny and presented this is like a bit of like don’t take it too seriously you can still make something cool for cheap thank you drift games is not the only car culture focused business in this facility which is appropriately named the engine block it’s literally a block of businesses

That cater to the Irish motoring Community there’s a classic dealership a restoration shop a world-class detailer and even a motorcycle shop plus much much more drift games is located up on the second floor so they built a huge car elevator just to move their cars around So in the U.S there’s a novelty with driving a right-hand drive car I notice you have a couple left-hand drive cars here is that kind of the same thing for you guys you know what it’s I would say Us cars here not a huge culture but I’ve

Always had a big Love For Us cars I mean when I go to U.S events I’m looking at the trucks in the car park and even more than the JDM Cars because they’re so different I think that’s the thing if you never see them your whole life then

You want them so the Corvette for me was a car that I think my field had just built his and I was like that looks super cool and it’s also a sports car drifting as opposed to a coupe trying to be a sports car or whatever so I like

Just the Lions we built it version one full hdk we’re still looking to have hdk in Europe so it’s cheaper for us to buy stuff from Latvia we did all carbon fiber this is an LS3 built LS3 it has a Samsung sequential winter is Quick Change on the back and all the steering

Wheel controls are all buttons on the steering wheel which is unusual for a drift car the wheel spins a lot and then that was version one and that was great Larry everyone was fine because there was only two or three drift Corvettes in the world then seven thousand people

Built drift Corvettes including a friend of minex so they put a three rotor in the car which is there this weekend Mine looks very ordinary all of a sudden so I sent the car to Dara McNamara at Group D and I said can you make this look like the most ridiculous Pikes Peak sort of crazy car in the world something Batman would drive if he did track days

And Darren showed me nothing for five months and I arrived and this is what rolled out of the shed and he said I went as far as I would go he even said he went further than he did on his own cars with just how Wild it looks and I

Think it just it’s just like nothing else it’s almost like a piece of art that he’s made out of aluminum and bits and pieces but it’s a lot of time and thinking and making the car balanced and Darren was trying to make every part of every line make sense along the car most

Of it’s completely non-functional like there’s just winglets and things that don’t do anything but it was to give that almost like if a kid came up to the car he would just go wow and that was the whole point was just it’s a totally like function like

Even probably bad for function for a drift car we’ve already had issues where if you’re driving in the rain the water just comes up on your windscreen and things like that but it looks cool and that’s what I wanted it to be because I’m not the best drifter in the world so

If you’re going to be kind of mediocre at it you might as well look really cool doing it so that’s kind of what I wanted to do was just make people smile because it’s such a silly car we have to refabricate the whole back end of the

Car just to take the weight of the arrow so it’s it’s a fun car but it’s it’s also drives really good it’s got It’s a pro car but um I just like how raw it is and every time I come in here in the morning and I

See it I just go what a silly thing to exist in the drift world So then we actually have quite the history last time I was here in Ireland at Mandela Park was 11 years ago making us feel old now Larry it doesn’t feel like 11 years it doesn’t feel like it but it was just so cool to be here to shoot daiyoshihara yep Frederick osbo

Dean Kearney James Dean was driving his Sr powered FDA I think it’s red right yep Darren Falcon yeah just so many people that we came up with in terms of like the car culture world we were all there at that event I had no idea where

We were going with us at the time so like for me that was my second ever event emceeing an event thought that would be my last I was like oh you know nice little experience to have got the bug came in did more gigs still have no

Idea how we got this far or why any of this exists but amazing to think that where all of those people at that event have gone on to do things from Dean Carney to James to Freddy to all those people and you’ve obviously done so much around the world that it’s crazy that

This event is kind of bringing us all back in together again 11 years later the same the same crew the same heads yeah so let’s talk about this event so this event may be the biggest Ireland car culture event of all time well last year we did the LZ Festival which we

Called it which is an event that me and Adam just had a conversation in the US and said wouldn’t it be cool to bring all the best of Europe guys out with all the kind of say you know well-known uh content creators put them all together see what happens expected like it would

Be a fun event it did more Spectators than any drift event in the history of Europe all of Europe all of Europe so we were like okay well now we can’t just do one so then we said this year we’ll up it again we’ll bring some more people

Build some cars specifically for the event and because the competition element of it is all for a show even though it’s a comp we can put in silly cars that like James Dean’s building a four rotor he’s never going to compete in the four rotor but this is the

Perfect event to come and just put a show on for the fans so it gave another little Avenue almost like a very unprofessional Goodwood Festival speed for Drifters and content creators kind of style you know what I like to call it I like to call it the car YouTube Olympics

That’s a very accurate statement it’s like everybody’s gathered in some location yeah whether it be Florida or you know this weekend it’s uh in Ireland yep and then another weekend it’s going to be Australia another weekend it’s going to be in Toronto Canada right yeah so it’s like also though you’ve got some

Legitimacy like you’ve got the guys who just finished first and second in drift Masters in Finland still competing on it so you got the pros you get the guys starting off all these different stories and Journeys and then we bunch of cool cars like in the show cars that are

There and the Irish scene they build these cars and there’s so much passion but because Ireland is quite remote to have you guys come and see what they’ve been building for the last 10 years they bring the best of the best out so it’s really fun they really appreciate let’s

Say the international audience seeing their Creations for a weekend so it’s great for the Irish car scene 11 years ago when I came to Mandela park for pro drift I was able to kind of see a good snapshot of what the dress lifting scene was like at the time in Ireland but this

Weekend’s event is more of a global event yeah and it is just so cool that it’s come to this point that we have this many people that are interested in this sport Ireland has just always had that passion for drifting it helps because we’re really good guys at us but

And again a sport I think does grow with success and you see that in Finland with Cali Robin Pera the WRC Champion people get behind a sport they’re very good at we always had really good Drifters but we always had a very passionate car and obviously we got a lot of imports way

Earlier than the US did or anyone else because we’re right-hand drive there was no law against it so we had s15s or 34s 20 years ago so there was always a bubbling culture but I think what they really like here is that they’ve always been doing this but now we’ve got a

Little bit more let’s say eyeball is on which keeps the scene stronger it gives them a reward for all their bills that you guys come and check them out so there’s so many excited people coming this weekend for you guys to see the Creations over the last five or six

Years and it keeps us a scene strong here and also they get to beat their Heroes which I love seeing all throughout the weekend foreign The LZ World Tour may be the first successful worldwide drift series and it’s different in that Adam actually created this event just because he wanted to drive cool tracks all over the world with his friends as always I love getting behind the wheel of a Chase vehicle to do some

Really close filming at speed unfortunately it was pretty tough to Source a vehicle but Jake Crouch actually reached out to me on Instagram and told me that he has a spare e92 Nurburgring track tool for me to use he also trailered his R32 all the way from the UK just for this event

All right so we are in the 365 performance e92 M3 Bella Park in Ireland I’ve never chased drift cars in a right-hand Drive I just can’t believe I’m doing it here at Mandela bar at LZ Fest it’s so cool such an honor apparently this is the first time anybody’s really done

Proper Chase car stuff here at mondella so I’m actually excited to see the footage and see how it comes out [Applause] unfortunately in true Irish fashion it rained on us pretty much the entire time so unfortunately Friday practice was pretty much the only opportunity that I had a chance to drive and film the vehicles at speed despite the Terrible Weather people from all over the world especially Europe

Came just to check out the event there were so many world-class drivers world-class show cars we made a ton of new friends and we met so many new people this may have been the grandest Motorsport Festival that Mandela park has ever seen I just can’t wait to go to

Another LZ World Tour event