This weekend will be the Finale for Formula Drift series 2009. Come check it out at the House of Drift – Irwindale Speedway!

 Come support Carl Rydquist driving the City Tire 350Z Twin Turbo.

Ok boys and girls, after having done two Formula D events, we took a great step forward in my 3rd ever Formula D event which was Las Vegas, by qualifying 7th(!). I think we can be pretty proud over how fast this small team, with great support from friends and sponsors, has gotten a whole lot of things right with the car.

It was a truly eventful weekend again, just like at Long Beach when everything was new but made top 32 first time in FD, and at Atlanta when the gearbox was completely gone by qualifying (I was lucky to pull it off anyway with some creative driving to make top 32). That time we swapped the gearbox until 5 in the morning and made some good tandem runs against Darren MacNamara who went on to podium.

By the time Las Vegas came around, we had developed and setup the car to a level where it was finally like it should be to drive. We had an amazing team effort just before qualifying, as the rear camber and toe arms snapped when I was scrubbing off the tires for my first qualifying run. Just like that. Wow. Glad that didn’t happen during a run on the course.

To fix it before qualifying run 2, evveryone went in different directions to get stuff or get hold of people. Not easy with almost everyone out on the grid! Forsberg offered up one arm, we got a welding machine from Rene’s Motorsports, but where is any sufficient power to run it??? Dynamics came to the rescue on that one. Now, who can weld aluminum..! Rene himself showed up, clock ticking fast now. Most cars had done qualifying run number 1… With express speed our super tech Oskar got the arms on, I barely had time to get the helmet and seatbelts sorted out. In my head – one shot only, zone out everything else.

Like mentioned, with the APR and AIT parts and a well needed diet on the car, I was finally able to make full use of the grippy and smoky Hankook RS3-tires we run on, and drive like I wanted to in Vegas, not just trying to overcome difficult car behavior. This was also a new track layout – for everyone! This gave equal chances to all newcomers in FD when the teams and drivers who have been in FD many seasons before had no setups to get a head start with, or any previous track experience here.

Didn’t take long for the qualifying score summary to come up and there we go, 87.5p! This was a big reward for all the work so far, finally. Now we know. For SURE.

Here’s a video of the second half of the qualifying (if someone has a full video from qualifying including the 86mph entry let me know and I will post it up).

Carl Rydquist Las Vegas Round 4 Formula D qualifying run from City Tire Online on Vimeo.

Later; ran some practice, followed a slow car who lost the drift, later lined up with Dai. Left some space, but grip had rapidly disappeared and still being close to the edge, I tapped the tire wall. The team got some work on their hands but car was fine for warm-up.

Next day – warmup. Now it was pretty well known it was getting slippery out there, many cars had brushed or hit the wall. This fact and rememering the close call last night I took it easy, lower revs and initated really early… but believe me I was seriously surprised over literally no grip at all, not just low grip, really really no grip. Couldn’t get speed to scrub off enough. A mix of factors left me needing an additional 2 car lengths, this would have been enough to avoid hitting the wall…

Very sad moment, no chance to get the car fixed fast enough to make the competition rounds, to be able to follow up on a very good qualifying and car setup, so that was our end of that FD event.

Moving forward, we brought home some pretty cool statistics after only my 3rd ever FD competition, a pretty nice reward for the work done to make the car competitive;

Qualify in top 8 – Check.
Qualify ahead of reigning World Champion – Check.
Qualify ahead of reigning Formula D Champion – Check.
Qualify ahead of a 2-time Formula D Champion – Check.
Qualify ahead of 2009 points leader – Check.
Qualifying speed full points – Check.

These facts bring some pretty solid determination to our upcoming efforts and expectations. You can easily say we have raised the bar and from here on drift life with the City Tire / Kallusive Clothing Formula Drift Team will get even more exciting.

Next stop and season finale is: Irwindale Speedway! To this round we will come armed with a new open lightweight straight single pipe exhaust (another 50lbs lost on the car), raw engine sound and more torque. Don’t miss it!!!!

Ok, here’s the deal: The official pics from this shoot, with all the new AIT Racing parts and the wicked APR GTC carbon fiber wing, with slightly expanded Kallusive graphics, will be coming out later (I’ll let you know when and where), but how bout I post a sneak peak from the shoot here, right now (caught by Kallusive)…
Sure, I’m pretty biased but this Z looks just right – fast, full of purpose and with a pretty innovative design.

When I went to Germany and spent some time back in the ‘Porsche shoes’, the City Tire / Kallusive Clothing 350Z Twin Turbo got some good work done to it after Formula Drift in Atlanta. We cancelled New Jersey due to the 24H and to work on getting the car up to top notch; City Tire went on a weight loss mission on the car and AIT Racing fitted carbon fiber doors (they feel like they have the weight of regular post stamps – amazing), a new hood and hatch, new sleek sideskirts and a new front. Even more panels to come from them in the future so watch out as we’re getting lighter!

All in all a very noticeable reduction in weight, the car got much better to drive, more agile and definitely much more responsive to any input. I very much recommend doing this on any Z used for grip or drift, the performance improvement is just huge.

From APR we got another great performance improvement – a GTC carbon fiber rear wing. A lot of people have been against the usage of a wing on their drift car, however I guess it all comes down to the overall setup of each and every car, weight distribution, spring, shock, swaybar settings, suspension design, tire choice. On our testing session, I was so happy I can’t even tell you, it was such a relief to get this thing on the car, finally getting the car to behave like I want it to! Definitely leaped forward to the famous Next Level.

The GTC wing itself is very impressive, pretty huge and with great aerodynamic data on paper already, and when using it in real life, only minor changes to the wing attack angle completely changed the behavior of the car and therefore it got very direct and easy to setup since it is immediately noticeable when we got too much downforce on the rear end, or too little.

Also props here to our buddy Justin who made a very serious chassis mounted wing installation, with the mounts going through the hatch. Here’s a vid from one of the testing runs with the new parts, this is before we cleaned the car up and got it ready for a cool photoshoot ahead of Vegas (pics to come from that one).