At the end of the day we went All-Star Bash style = busted zipties and full lock.

Photo by tunerzine.com

Formula Drift 2009, Long Beach, top 32:
I wasn’t awarded the best odds to move on from top 32 as I was set to do tandem against reigning FD champion (T. Foust), but I was happy with the overall performance of the City Tire / Kallusive Clothing 350Z Twin Turbo so I was feeling fairly optimistic nevertheless, there was all to win.

Spent the Saturday morning warm-up to play around a little with tire pressures and scrubbed in a pair of new Hankook tires. Tried a few times to change the line and stretch the capacity of the car, but it got forced and in the end I just had to fall back on what felt natural and just make bigger lines in order to carry more speed. The team was doing great spotting and coaching from what they saw from the grandstands.

Photo by madro21@Flickr.

It was a great fun session. The Hankook tires just kept holding up, it was awesome. Did some practice runs with Sam Hubinette and Vaughn Gittin Jr.

Photo by Driftfotos.com

Photo by madro21@Flickr

Photo by madro21@Flickr
Competition time: As the lights went green Tanner rolled off real slow on 1st and 2nd which suited me very well as my 3rd gear is like a rocketship anyway. Had my entry speed / rpm where I wanted it with a perfect gap to Tanner, as I was setting myself up to take a raceline, which would allow a very fast lauch out of turn 9 to turn 10, using the impressive performance I get with the Technosquare engine and our new Carbonetic diff.

The mistake I did taking this “racing line”, was that I went a tiny bit too deep with my entry, and at Long Beach turn 9 there is only a very narrow strip of regular tarmac that has enough grip to make the turn. So instead of a rocket launch the car lost sideways bite on the slippery tar-ish surface and I just had to line the car up as parallell as possible to minimize the impact in the layers of tires padding the wall at the exit of “turn 9”. Tapped the rear end and the car rotated so I lost the front bumper.

Photo by wreckedmagazine.com

Used my 5 minute “time out” to remove the rear bumper that had torn a few zipties off already and checked the car but it was only a matter of cosmetics that our bodyshop South Gate Collision can easily handle.

Green lights again, me leading this time. Relaxed and went for a typical “me” run, fast and smooth, drifting the car as close as possible to the outer clipping zones and hanging the rear out at the important outside barrier in the last hairpin, hoping to force Tanner to look like he was playing it way too safe so that the judges would call for “one more time”.

Photo by tunerzine.com

It definitely could have worked, this run awarded a great crowd response and one of the judges did vote “one more time”.

My first ever Formula Drift event awarded me a good amount of important points and most of all a very good evaluation of the City Tire / Kallusive Clothing 350Z. The car is incredibly strong and my setup work has really paid off. Next round I will definately prepare for a good qualifying and then move it up from there. Until then I know the team is really eager to get a lot of unnecessary weight off the car.

Thanks to everyone coming out to cheer on, great thanks to City Tire who never fails to deliver, everyone at Kallusive Clothing (your design team worked soo hard with the amazing livery on the car), Hankook for awesome rubber, Carbonetic for a diff that really makes a difference, Technosquare for tons of power (and we still have more to crank out), South Gate Collision for keeping our backs if things go wrong + Attic, Zeal, Endless. Also a note of appreciation to all FD and Long Beach event staff for a really good event. I haven’t had fun like this in a long time.

See you soon and don’t hesitate to stop by at City Tire for the latest gossip. /Carl

Season Opener for Top Drift 2009 (www.justdrift.com) was at Willow Springs, CA on the Balcony Course.

A well organized event that brought out the best amateur competitors out to try and win some of the great prizes that Just Drift has picked up for 2009. And most importantly, the Top Drift competition has been sanctioned by Formula Drift (www.formulad.com) to grant a minimum of 3 Pro licenses at the end of this season! 

 We were out there in full force! Lots of tire changing needed for this event as the competition was fierce. They were going through a lot of tires, even for a course like Balcony which has a reputation of being kind to tires. I never really get to thank our crew too much on our blog…. BIG THANKS TO OSCAR AND INES! Thank you for taking off your relaxing weekends to come support all the grassroots drifters. It couldn’t be done without them!

 Jeri (yellow Z) a first time competitor with some rally background in his youth did surprisingly well in qualifying, all he needed to qualify next time would of been some nicer tires. Really bad understeering on his beat up tires. Mike Essa (RX-7 FC) was killin it as always. Every time he was ready to go, people heard the roaring LS motor, and would ran to the the fences to peep his runs. Good stuff!

 Matt Powers (green 240sx) took 2nd place in ProAm qualifying. He is damn near amazing to watch at Balcony, guy is so sick to be using Advan Neovas in the REAR! (http://www.yokohamatire.com/tires/advan_neova.aspx)

Forrest Wang was also showing the nice wide line in his freshly painted black 240sx.

 Taka Aono, Henry Schelley, and Hiro Sumida had a really tough time judging. So many more than 16 drivers had great runs to make it. Those that did are shown here. Congrats!

 Top 16 lined up! Since all 16 cars had cages and met regulations, for the first time in Topdrift history, we would square the Top 16 off in head to head Tandem Battle! Not 1 person objected to the decision… so it was on! Here is Cyrus and Forrest going head to head in the first battle. They had to go one more time, it was a crazy match right off the bat! It set the tone to the following competitors that this would not be easy. Great tandem runs all day.

 Nice Sticker placement by Jack Hsu (http://azndoc.wordpress.com/) one of our CTO drivers. Both of our drivers were able to get to Top 16, Jack and Carl Rydquist (http://blog.carlrydquist.com/). Jack did a great job, and it was a really close call in a battle with Mike Bolanos.

Carl Advanced to Top 8 and was beat by Forrest Wang in the following round where he said “Hello” to a hay bale! They did a great job, we are very pleased.

This was Jack’s first competition, and Carl’s first real outing with the Red 350Z. Thanks for representing CTO!

Forrest and Matt battled it out in the finals. It was a difficult one to call with Forrest eventually coming up with the win. Congrats to Forrest in 1st place, Matt for 2nd, and most of all Mickie Frial for taking 3rd place podium finish in a BORROWED car that was blowing fumes all afternoon! Great driving guys.

After the individual competition, it was time for the Team Drift Competition. It was really exciting to watch. Fast and close, and I mean door to door action.

After the team competition, it was open practice, where our CTO drivers got to drive together for the first time. They were really going after it.

Top Drift Rd.1 was the most exciting competition that we had yet to participate in. Thank you to Just Drift for raising the bar for amateur competition. Grassroots looks to be making a huge comeback in 2009.  Charlie of Just Drift did announce that Top Drift Rd.2 could be moved from HTM to Viva Las Vegas!  

This competition was “Moto” approved. But after a long day of helping out at the track, dude was ready to go home…

See ya next round and big thanks to Just Drift, the drivers, spectators, and all of the Top Drift Sponsors for 2009:

Our last Drift Event of the year is All Star Bash V held at Willow Springs. 2 Days of crazy nonstop drifting and partying (winter vers.) has come to past as our last drift support event of 2008. Here are some pics from the infamous HTM (Horse Thief Mile).

Ines and Sandy enjoy breakfast as the drivers start to roll in wheels for us to mount tires on. It was a pretty busy day for us, considering the lesser than normal turnout for this event.

Flybert pulls up in a…. Bimmer? His long awaited project is still underway, but rest assure it’ll be one hell of a build. So for this ASB he decided to get loose on Sat night. From what I heard he was pretty wasted off of the last Everclear shots. Jack as usual was being an ass and screaming in his ear the following morning. LOL!

After tormenting Flybert for several minutes, Jack got hungry. BIG Thanks to Charlie for hooking up the Fried Chicken. CTO Approved! Is it me or does Charlie look like the Federal mascot on the side of his car?

Thanks to JustDrift for a great venue for CTO to spread its wings. And a special thanks to all the drivers that attended the JD events in 2008. Next year we have big plans. Let’s kill it in 2009!

RBWDC 2008 was a blast. CTO was able to attend and work this event via Formula D to mount tires for all the International competitors that came from as far as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and Asia! Huge event with even a larger Track. Some drivers were calling it a 1/4 drag race with the first initiation happening at about 100MPH for most cars!

www.formulad.com

Although conditions weren’t ideal for Friday due to the So Cal wildfires breaking out everywhere, the main event on Sunday called for clear skies! A great venue to host a World Championship with Red Bull Title sponsoring a total purse of $50,000 split between the top 3 drivers!!!

Hey what’s going on here? What’s this crowd all about? Oh… The drivers autograph session. Pretty cool of Formula Drift to take some time for fan appreciation. I can’t remember another time I’ve seen so many professional drivers line up at the same time to hang out for autographs.. very cool!

Time to get started. Starting grid at RDWDC looked very dramatic with the Long Beach Port cranes and containers in the background. Certainly photogenic even off our crappy little point and shoot camera. I’d better get ready, stopping by the Red Bull Bus for free Red Bulls all weekend. We made great use of it.

www.redbull.com

1st Practice run General Tire’s Marco Santos from Canada ran into the wall. After hours upon hours of hammering away, the car was ready for the grid again.. WOW!

More FD cars on the grid ready to go, this is right before they drag race down the pier. This was the best shot I could get of a car flying by the wall.

Congrats to Rhys Millen for winning the $25,000 first place prize. (That’s him doing donuts if you can’t tell). All in all a great event weekend. By the time it was done it was dark and everyone was rushing for the exit. Once again, congrats to Rhys Millen(1st), Daijiro Yoshihara(2nd), and Tanner Foust(3rd).

Thanks to Formula Drift, Drift Association, International participants, our Staff, and our affiliates for making this happen for us.

Setting up for the Pro-AM Nationals bright and early in the morning. Drivers that had qualified during Pro-AM regionals gather together at the last event of the year to compete for their Formula Drift license for 2009. And yes that is Jack Hsu, now working with CTO. He said he’s feeling good this morning after a nice hardy breakfast!

www.formulad.com

Friday was a pretty rough day with all the fires in the South land creating ash and debrit flying all over the place. On Saturday it finally cleared up and was a beautiful day at the Long Beach Ports. All the drivers and cars were set up and gone through tech inspection on Thurs, so first thing in the morning they were all ready to go. Naoki (Drift Association) was liking the progress, but really busy!

www.driftday.com

 San Diego Crew representing. It was a pleasure to see all the cars and drivers that were taking Pro-AM seriously.

Jack on the grid eatting Breakfast #2! That’s trouble. The Grid was stacked with nice cars… spectators were having a hard time believing that most of these cars were amateur, private funded vehicles.

Sexy Slide S14 driven by Yoshie, that’s right a female! And Megan Racing showing up with 2 cars to qualify for their Formula Drift License.

Many of the Pro-AM drivers were actually Formula D drivers that were unable to score a point during the 2008 season. So they would have to relicense for 2009 via Pro-AM Nationals. 2 of them were Quoc Ly and D. Piña. Competition was tough.

I think the breakfast #2 got to Jack, LOL! After that it went downhill for a while, cars were coming in looking so sad.

Jack was out trying to see if anyone needed a hand or a hug. A lot of these wrecked cars actually made or almost made it back to the grid. Mad Props for not giving up!

More Carnage. The entry was so fast, it was easy to be traveling rear end to the wall. Scary course and layout, great for spectators, but you can feel the pain in the drivers and car owners.

Even the big dogs were getting some advice (Chris Rado and Von Gitten Jr.) to keep it clean. Even Rado went into it. He’s looking pretty concerned about his car.

Rado’s dog (Slick) was a welcoming face to return to for Chris, after a rough tap into the wall.. all is well with Slick to come back to. The top 3 finishers for Pro-AM were #1 Quoc Ly, #2 Matt Powers, #3 Mike Essa. And congrats to all the other drivers that now have their FD License 2009!

Thanks to everyone for their support.