Our trip to water fest.
As you know, Waterfest is the largest VW/Audi show in the country. And if you're within driving distance to Raceway Park in Englishtown, NJ, there is no excuse why you couldn't make the annual trip. Any die-hard VW/Audi fan would put his or her car before anything else. We even saw a Jetta as far away from Oregon!
Waterfest is a two-day event that caters to just about every aspect of car activities. The event had a car show, drag race, autocross, DBL contest, burnout contest, various performance vendors, and even a swap meet. They even invited All Wheel Dyno who brought with them a mobile trailer dyno. For those who wanted to see how much horsepower their cars made, $70 got them two pulls and a dyno sheet to prove. This past July was especially eventful because we held our annual Kreuzerfest to Waterfest. This year we had two starting locations, in the north at Momentum Tuning in Connecticut and the south at Electrodyne in Virginia. Those who participated in our Kreuzerfest had a chance to be chosen to represent us at the eurotuner booth. And the cars we chose were hot. As every year we sold t-shirts for $10 and with every sale we tossed in a goody bag. We also gave away a crateful of current issues for free. And we even offered a two-year subscription for only $25. That's a about a dollar per issue!
The biggest concern this year was of course the weather. It was dj vu all over again from last year. On Saturday it looked promising with no rain but we were plagued with extreme humidity and heat.
Making our way to the car show we ran into many vendors. Vendors like AWE Tuning, HPA, Momentum, Neuspeed, APR and many more. They brought out there latest products and displayed its project cars. People were flocking to them, buying and conversing with the representatives. The car show was the biggest portion of the event. We couldn't get an exact figure however imagine your local Wal-Mart parking lot completely filled with VW and Audi. There were a lot of quality cars and each generation and model was well represented. And everyone was working hard to get their cars cleaned spotless before the judges came around.
Next to the show was the drag strip. There were a lot of first timers as evident to there line up. Very often they would pass the line not knowing about the double yellow lights on the tree. Of course there were the hardcore racers with monster slicks, most of these guys were running fully built motors with T70 turbos. The fastest time we witnessed was in the low tens. We even heard over the loud speaker that one of them set the first triple zero reaction time of the day.
The autocross was set for the second day of the event. The course was rather small however as any autocrosser knows, it's not the size of the course that matters rather it's how fast you finish that counts. One of the fastest times set was by Mk2 Golf with slicks all around. But rendered them useless once the rain came down.
That day the weather turned for the worse and the heavens opened with torrential down pours. Many spectators took refuge under any tent that could find. The place started to look like a shantytown. Deafening thunders made everyone nervous as the lightning strikes were as close as a few miles away. As soon as the rain let up, people were packing to leave.
It's ironic how the event ended with rain; it is called Waterfest after all. Aside from the weather, the event was a blast. If you didn't make it this year, shame on you. The only way to make it up is to attend next years Waterfest. If you're not sure how to get there, you might as well travel with us. For more information, check out www.eurotuner.com and www.waterfest.net.