Formula D Diaries - Sam Hubinette - Import Tuner Magazine

Sam Hubinette
The two-time winner of Formula D, the Crazy (and only known) Swede of drift, Sam Hubinette lost Long Beach to Chris Forsberg. With Thor on his side, Sam is aiming his Mopar-powered Mjollnir straight at the title.

Overall, it was a good weekend at the Formula Drift Round Two event at Road Atlanta, with some disappointments. We had the supercharged '06 championship Viper out there, but we ran into some problems with the lifters, so we decided to run the other Viper. It's pretty awesome to have two cars! We managed to get the non-supercharged Mopar Dodge Viper SRT10 competitive with the other championship one, but we were struggling with the 335 KDW tires from BFGoodrich. This was the first time we ran that size on the Viper in a competition, and we were fighting too much traction, so we had to make changes on the car to get it looser in the rear.

I qualified Fourth and went up against Conrad Grunewald in the Top 16 eliminations and managed to beat him and his monster Corvette. He is an awesome driver and a good buddy of mine. In the Great 8, I went up against Takatori in his Skyline and had an advantage after the first run, with me leading 8 to 7. One of the tricky parts of Atlanta is that you are drifting down a straightaway, and with the gearing I have, you have to shift gears. If you do not shift fast enough, you lose your drift. With that said, I rushed too hard and got into Fifth gear instead of Third. I was done for the day. There was no one to blame except myself. Crap! LOL.

The good news is that I bumped up to First Place in a tie with Forsberg in the overall points chase and we are getting ready for Jersey and a brand new track, so that is exiting.