CAPESTANCE SLAMOMETER II
06 April 2013 | Photos & words: RaceMasteR J | Location: Tekton, Parow, Cape Town.

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It was only about a week ago when CapeStance announced on their site that there was going to be a second Slamometer event. It may have been short notice but word of this upcoming event spread far and wide rather quickly since their first one was a great success, even though it was held in a very much hidden away private business park in Platterkloof.


Arriving at the new venue in King Edward Street, Parow, I had my concerns. Like… is my car going to be safe parked here? Should I carry all my gear with me? I felt like I was in downtown Nigeria! It wasn’t very reassuring. None the less I found a parking spot, got my gear and started walking to what inevitability was going to be a great car event.


Tekton was the venue, CapeStance were the hosts. Man the place was buzzing! There was a mass of people and cars outside and with concealed glass on the building it only made me wonder what was going on inside. I proceeded towards the entrance.


Walking in to this massive and clinically clean warehouse I was amazed at the diversity of cars on show. Wait what? On show? I thought this was a Slamometer event where cars come and get measured how low they are…?


Well after walking around and checking out some of the display cars, I indeed found out that it was going to be just what
I initially thought. Phew!


CapeStance changed the format a little on this one though compared to their first event. This was a little more formal with a car show type event at first, or one could simply call it “Parc fermé” for slammed cars, followed by the actual vehicle height… measuring… system… thing… Slamometer!


Now, let me give you some history. This is only the second event of this nature held in Cape Town, that I know of, and obviously both were done by CapeStance. The first one was a measuring system where the roof to ground, arch to wheel, bumper to ground… basically too many measurements were looked at, which made it a little confusing.

This time however they made it much simpler. I call it the rugby pole system. Two vertical poles joined by a horizontal one and a car underneath gives you the cars height. But what it actually was, was the limbo drive through system.


This was a knock out type event where they start off with a certain height and if your car made it through/underneath you went to the next round where the pole would be lower, and so on and so forth, until you only have one car remaining.


Sounds cool and it makes for some exciting, non action type “spectator sport”.


You know when people point and stare at your car because they think it looks cool, here they think it looks broken...


Even the skate boards were slammed!


Here’s the thing that doesn’t make sense to me though. Now I am by no means an expert in this field but I somehow see a fundamental flaw. As cool as the limbo system is, it only allows the lowest of rooflines through.

Now since this was a slammed event, meaning to see how low a car is, it only makes sense to see how low the car is off the ground. (Chassis to ground distance.) A bus could have the lowest chassis to ground distance but it would never win because of its extremely high roof line. But how can it not win because it supposed to be the lowest vehicle at a slammed event?


Which brings me to the actual winners of this event. It was a tie between a VW Karmann Ghia and a Honda CRX. Now as you may know, both cars are very low in stock form, simply because of their design. Both cars were lowered to a certain extent, but they were by no means slammed.


So the irony of it all is that a Slamometer event was won by two not so slammed cars. There were plenty beetles and other cars absolutely lower than a snakes belly, but they never exactly featured.


So to the guys at CapeStance, you have a winning formula, the event WAS a massive success, no doubt and well done, but I think the recipe needs a little tweaking here and there.


But as with anything new you learn from experience and one thing is guaranteed for sure, I certainly can’t wait for the next one! Feel free to check out the rest of the gallery below...

RaceMasteR J