Ultrace 2023

We've been known to be "willing to travel' in our quest to take a whole load of our top detailing products to the world's best cars shows. We love the UK events of course, and we make our way to most of them during the season, but we are at heart a British brand with a huge worldwide view. In fact, this year alone we've been at events everywhere from Tokyo to Tennessee, and in the last few weeks we've attended Tuning World Bodensee in Germany, XS CarNight in Italy and Petrol Brothers in Belgium. So, what made us add yet another cross continental journey to Poland to our already manic schedule? Because it's for Ultrace, and Ultrace is absolutely awesome.

This one is a unique concept for sure, not only is the static part of the event one of the world's most renowned in terms of the quality of "invite only' builds on offer. But the other half is the completely mental addition of a whole load of motorsport action and balls-to-the-wall drifting all around the massive venue. It harks back to the a few years ago when the show was called Raceism, and that's the kind of mix that you just don't get anywhere else.

As for the invite only bit, we were asked to exhibit our Liberty Walk Super Silhouette S15 Silvia, Caddy V2 build and our Pandem kitted GR Yaris this time around, but we also had a surprise up our sleeves too. We'd also be bringing along an AF Project car built to destroy on the drift circuit. Our SR20 Turbo-powered Datsun GX1200 Coupe would be making its worldwide debut. The only problem was of course, we had to actually finish it first!

Now it's worth mentioning that this project has been a good few years in the making, and we'll be getting to that monster story in another article on our blog. But even so, the finishing touches went right into the wee hours of the night before we were due to load up and leave for the show. But then again, that's just how modified car builds work, right?

With the Datsun finally finished up and on its own trailer, it was just the small matter of loading up all the other pre-prepped cars at the Detailing Academy and shipping them directly to Poland's enormous Wroclaw Football Stadium. With so many of them being used this year, including the ones we've already mentioned, along with James 992 GTS and our bagged VW Transporter, we even had to draft in a massive HGV transporter to get most of them all there overnight. Luckily, it's not just the detailing products we're experts in super fast shipping - we've got this kind of totally bonkers side of show logistics down to a tee these days, too.

Unloading and setting up quickly and efficiently for an event like this is another thing our show team have got down to a fine art nowadays. It's a good thing too, with so many cars of ours on display at a huge event like this, it's all hands on deck to make sure they're perfected for the show to detail away any signs of the long journey.

This time around too, there were plenty of other cars from friends of AF we were asked to help out with before the gates opened to the public. Not least Kato-san's Liberty Walk Super Silhouette Skyline that was shipped all the way from Japan especially for the show. Calling in a trusted brand to get the best from the top display cars is common at premier events like this one, and we were more than happy to oblige…

So, how did the Datsun do on its first outing? Well, forget the relatively tame Champions League action that usually goes on here at this giant stadium, because our little Japanese coupe absolutely tore it up like never before. It's quite a car that's for sure, but we have to say that so was the driver. This time around we got a ringer in and handed over the keys to one of the top pro drifters we sponsor, Archie from CDK Tuning - better known as the Crazy Drift Kid (he's only 16 you see). You may have seen Archie decimating all at plenty of championships this year in his Pro E36 drift car (it's easy to spot in its awesome AF livery), but we had him on hand this weekend to really put the Datsun through its paces, lighting up the tyres and smoking "em all around the outside of the stadium. And that's before we even got to all the other stuff going on!

And as for the show cars on display? Well, they were pretty dam special too. After all, they have to be or they wouldn't be here at Ultrace. In fact, you'll find 1000 of the worlds finest builds right here and every single car is vetted by the crew out of literally thousands and thousands of applications. Of course, we couldn't possibly show them all, but here's a whole load of our absolute favourites…

So, that was the biggest thing to go off in Poland for quite some time then, and you can guarantee we'll be making the trip to the next one, probably with a load more AF projects in tow - we've got a whole year to work out what. For updates and announcements on Ultrace keep an eye ontheir website, and you can see more AF event reports over on the Shows section of our blog.