When you boil down this massive love affair with all things automotive that we share, it’s a few simple factors that make it so damn addictive: that thrill of mashing the loud pedal and feeling the drive wheels light up while trying to hold the steering wheel straight, being forced back into your seat harder and harder the faster that you get, and having your ear drums tickled by the symphony of automotive instruments just cannot be beaten. Nothing makes you feel quite as good as driving a car hard; it’s what most of this scene is built on, and at the very heart of that is doing it all with a bunch of good people around you.
Chrome has long been the go-to event for piling your mates into available seat space and using whatever you have on hand to satisfy this very craving, without having to resort to illegal back-road antics that will land you in hot water with the law.
Grab yourself an entry to Chrome and you can line up your nana’s Corolla against a GT-R and get eaten in a glorious blaze of mutual laughter, hurt a few feelings in your 500kW sleeper, or give those chassis rails a good workout in your low-and-slow car-park queen. However you choose to do it, there’s a shit ton of fun to be had and something to keep everyone happy; cruising, drifting, grip chasing, burnouts, gymkhana, hard parks, and plenty of feeds. It’s events like Chrome that make all the late nights worth it. Each frustration and setback is forgotten the second that you get behind the wheel, fire it up, and roll down pit lane towards track entry.
And there was once a time when the V8 crowd and the import crowd could barely share a car park without some form of altercation taking place as blind passions took over. So cramming a mix of over 800 V8s and imports into the confines of a race track with very loose rules of engagement, you’d think could end in nothing but chaos. But thanks to Chrome, it would seem we have turned a corner, and can co-inhabit the venue in a civil fashion, well if you call 100m power skids, side-by-side while five up civil, that is.
If you didn’t quite make it in time this year, don’t worry; there will be plenty more to come, and we’ve done the hard yards to cover all the good bits from 2019, so you can feel like you were there too. Enjoy.
Roof line high flower pots on Greg Smith’s BLOWNQ top off the super tough small-block combo
Rocking a new look which was debuted at Speed Show ahead of a return to Summernats in 2020, Liz Gracie was unable to showcase what the 6/71 blown 358ci small block can do due to the sh#t weather
Carl Thompson is no stranger to killer V8 engine packages in his pair of drift Silvias, using the event to shake down his latest combo. Based around a Dart block, with a billet crank, and 430cfm Mast Str8jacket Heads, capacity sits at 428ci. Currently it’s pushing 1220hp to the tyre with the Vortech ysi-b supercharger running 16psi
