After a very eventful 3 days of drifting at Portland International Raceway for the Final Formula D Team Drift Competition of the year, Team Drifting Performance was able to pull off a 1st place finish. It was my first time to this amazing track. The course features very fast and technical corners. The judged portion of the track started with a long right hand triple apex sweeper into a 90-degree left and finished with a tight right hairpin. Very fun track.
I was not able to bring my RX-7 to this event because Garage Boso was working on installing my new motor for Seattle FD, so my friend, Matt McCoy of “The Dori Shop” based in Vancouver, WA kindly let me borrow his personal S13 for the event. Awesome car.
The car features really aggressive wheel fitments and stance, so gangster that the BN Sport aero was practically dragging the ground all around the car while the wide Falken RT-615’s were tucked and just barely rubbing the rear fenders lips. Can’t really get too much better than that. The aero was a little beat from a couple years worth of drifting, but at least you can tell this car has been driven hard and have been put to good use.
It was a battle all weekend for us to keep our cars running for the entire event. Formula D setup up the event so that Friday was practice, Saturday was qualifying, and Sunday was the main judged competition day.
During the first two days of the event, all of our cars had some kind of issue that prevented all of us from running together until Sun. Tony Brakohiapa had some issues keeping his supercharger belt staying attached to the motor.
Dan Pina blew the head gaskets on his Drift Patrol Mustang on Friday and with the help of his one man crew, Albert Rios, almost got it ready for the Sat session but just missed it by a minute and did not get to run until Sun.
The 240sx had a S14 SR20 setup that felt really strong until we had some minor coupler issues during the event which prevented the car from performing at its full potential, but held up fine and performed good enough during the main day to run with the team. Despite the lack of track time, it all came together at the end. All of us performed solid on Sunday, which allowed us to capture our first team win.
-Calvin Wan