SEMA Event - Smokin' In The Play-Ground

At last year's SEMA event the marketing company hosting the first D1GP in the USA, Slipstream Global, collaborated with SCCA to set up a new U.S. series to promote drifting. They call it Formula Drift, also known as Formula D. Now there are practice seminars popping up all over the country. With a U.S.-based series running this year, drivers have raised the bar to give even the Japanese drivers a run for their money. Just like any other series, you have to deal with politics, and in the case of D1GP, the main shareholder is Option magazine. It is almost sinful to promote another magazine's series in our pages; it makes more sense to promote a series not owned by another magazine's publishing company. This is where Formula D comes in. They have no magazine ties, so there isn't any red tape attached to cars and drivers, and we can photograph them. That was one of the main problems we discovered when working with D1GP, we weren't allowed to shoot any of the cars that signed contracts with D1-even with the owner's consent. But, enough of the politics, and on to the big show.

When we heard that Formula Drift's first stop was at Road Atlanta Raceway our first questions were: "Which turns will they use for the event?" and: "How the hell did they acquire this track for a drift event?" Never the less, they somehow pulled it off and the two-day event was on.

The drift event was also combined with one of the World Challenge stops as well as the Mazda Extreme Street Car show, so there was plenty of action on both days. They used turns 10 and 10a (after the high speed straight) up to the Suzuki bridge. Showing how serious the Road Atlanta staff is about drifting, they added an extra U-turn before the bridge so the racers competed back down hill in the opposite direction through turns 10a and 10. There were 41 entries in the Formula D series and just a little under half of them were out of California. Judging was conducted by a panel of Japanese drifters which included Utsumi from DRFT, Seigo Yamamoto sponsored by Falken tires, and Tarzan Yamada. Early round action eliminated some of the crowd favorites in the first round, including Ken Gushi, Calvin Wan and Alex Phiffer. One of the biggest battles was a full-fledged David versus Goliath match up: the V10-powered Viper driven by Samuel Hubinette up against Hawaii's bad boy, Alex Phiffer, in his turbocharged Corolla. While Samuel ended up taking the win it took two rounds for the judges to make the decision. A battle of this magnitude should have been a hands-down decision, but ended up being a battle almost too close to call. The last two battles of the day had just as much excitement. Samuel over took Hiro Sumida's Corolla, and this pitted him against Chris Forsberg's SR20-power 350Z in the last battle. This battle also ended up being a two-round fight with Samuel as the victor. While the Viper dominated the competition, controversy erupted over whether or not the car was eligible since it is a race-ready tube chassis racecar. Time will tell if the car will be allowed to continue in the Formula Drift series, but for now the Dodge and Samuel are victorious. For the record, when 2NR was shooting the sideline action, we were told by one of Road Atlanta's photographers that he had never seen a crowd of this size in the 30 years he had been shooting track events. Drifting just got huge over night now it's time to prove it's not a fluke at the next Formula Drift events in Houston, Texas and Sonoma, Calif.