"The suspension is all fairly custom," says Pfeiffer, "modified to fit those offset wheels. All the bushings have been replaced with Derlin instead of rubber." Our man also fitted some custom subframe spacers. The front and rear coilovers are old-school RS*R I-Shocks, with aluminum bodies, titanium reinforced springs, and two-way adjustment. Pfeiffer installed the suspension, fashioned some rear traction links and rear toe links, set it up, and did the corner balancing and alignment himself. The car sits low, with a -5.5-degree camber and zero toe at the front, and a -1.5-degree camber and 0.12 of an inch toe-in out back.
Those aforementioned wheels are Rays Engineering Volk Racing GTF two-piece forged models, sized 18x9 up front and 18x10 at the back, all with a +1mm offset. They're wearing Nitto NT05 tires, starting off as 265/35 front and 275/35 rear, but eventually being worn down to distressed rubber during the course of a drift event.
Equally important, but not taking so much of a pounding, is the Rotora braking system, with 14-inch rotors at the nose and 13-inchers bringing up the rear, with lines and pads from the same company.
Pfeiffer is known as a bit of a fabricator (or should that be pfabricator?) and we can see his handiwork inside the cabin. That six-point roll cage? A Pfeiffer pspecial. There's nothing in there that isn't necessary for racing, so two Sparco Corsa seats, a suede 330mm Sparco steering wheel, and G-Force racing harnesses make up most of the inventory. Plus that shift lever. "It's a B&M T-handle that I've run in my personal cars for the last 15 years," says Pfeiffer. "The same one. It just feels like home to me, so it has ended up in many of my cars."
As for the electrics, Pfeiffer puts his hand up to that too. "I bought a bunch of wires, a small fuse box, some switches, some relays, a blinker relay, some terminals, a lot of heat shrink, and I made a harness." Connected up in there somewhere is an Auto Meter rev counter. A quick look in the trunk reveals a Summit Racing 15-gallon fuel cell.
With a worth attached to the car in the region of $75,000, Pfeiffer's hoping to recoup some of the investment scrill in the 2010 Formula D series, now that he's out of the judges' tower and back in the driver's seat. The catch is that he'll be doing it from behind the wheel of an entirely different car. "I built the SC for the 2010 FD season, but a last-minute sponsorship deal put me in another car," he explains. As for the future of this SC: "I'm just trying to keep it in one piece for now," he says, "but its day will come."
Pfeiffer Pfacts
It's been a long, tough road for Alex Pfeiffer. But it hasn't been without its high points. It even started on a high, by being born in Hawaii (in 1975). "My father was a fan of the local circle track where he would take us every weekend to watch the races," he says. "That's where I started to enjoy motorsports, week after week of watching V-8s bang their way around the track, falling asleep in the stands. I was five or six, but knew I wanted to race. My first car was an '80 Mercury Zephyr my grandfather gave my dad. I tried everything I could to get it sideways or to burn out. I'd take it to the pineapple fields where it didn't take much power to get sideways."
Before long he was in SCCA races, working at a local speed shop and drifting around the local mountain roads. Then he heard the call of the mainland-a kind of mechanics training course/racing school. It wasn't the happiest of times for him, but it led to working with a team that raced Porsches, then a job fabricating custom parts and servicing Stuttgart's finest. By that time, he had an AE86 and was driving around the hillier parts of northern California. Then he found out about a drifting event at Buttonwillow, which he took part in with borrowed tires (lending tires for a drift event must be the height of generosity).