Long Beach

The morning of qualifying has arrived, we do some last minute checks on the car and get ready to practice.

 

Ian's crew for this event consisted of JD aka Crown Royal, Fern aka Anferny, Tuned Bill from Indy Speed, and Tim the toolman, Ian's father in law.  When they finished giving Ian their approval, his wife send him off to do what he does...

 

 

 

 

 

What does he do again???

Oh ya...

All was going well, well except the traction issues. Everyone, and I mean everyone was having a hard time with the new pavement, which made the first part of the track very grippy. To make things worse, a driver in the practice group with Ian crashed 2 times, causing his practice to be cut short. This was his reason for not getting the track dialed. Oh well, that is racing as they say. His qualitying runs were solid, but not enough to allow Ian to make the top 32.

 

Ian went on to be a representative for Drift Safari and himself for the rest of the event.

After the qualifying was over, the crew went back to the pits to survey the damage an extra wide wall tapping donut caused.

 

 

 

 

 

Then the fun started...

 

 

 

 

What a trooper... JD

 

Just some parting shots to make some people smile.

 

Nissan Powered!!!!

 

 

 

Till the next time.

BTW. New swag soon.

It is that time of the year again, the Formula Drift season is on us. Before we could go and compete, a few bugs with the new setup had to be taken care of. First off, the custom oil pan Ian fabricated was leaking, so it was removed and taken to the boys at The Independant Speed Shop http://indy-speed.com for some repairs. They did the work in a flash, and it worked perfectly. Next task was the supercharger.

Ian fabricated an extra tensioner, as he found that belts were being thrown like a monkey throws poo. All the time. 

With the help of Chris Scremin, the supercharger was changed to a turbo style piston ring design.

 

We tuned the car at the dyno at K&M, where it made 490 torque and 440hp at 5lbs boost, with our custom supercharger V1. Thanks to Brian for the late night of tuning. 

We hit the road, on our way to America. This is always an adventure, especially at the border. We either are run through the worst guard ever, or the guard is super cool. Today the guard had his coffee and let us into the USA with no issues. Forward we go. 

Well until the sort of exhaustion kicked in. Working 8 hours from 5am in the morning, then working on the car till 1-2am every day for 2 weeks burns a guy out. Here is Ian taking a snooze on the way down.

After a bit of snow, and no real issues, we hit LA, well, 20 or so hours later, we did. Traffic. Yay. Lots of people were looking at the car, and giving thumbs up. They knew it was awesome, but it looked kind of worse for wear. The road conditions were still winter through some of the trip.

So we gave the car a bath... 

Next stop was the Falken Tire warehouse. That place is huge, these were just performance tires, and just a taste of the amount of tires there were. WOW.

 

Ian was thirsty, and saw this vending machine, 55 cents for a soda, sure... Ian saw it took bills, cool, Ian did not had have any change, so he stuck a 5 dollar bill in the machine. Pop came out, no change did. Damn.

 

Most expensive can of pop EVER. Screw it, yo home to LA. Long Beach that is. 

All setup and ready for the next day. 

Well today we were setup at the track and got our tech inspection.

We met up with some of the Edmonton crew, and walked the track...

After walking the track, we left the track with the car ready for practice and qualifying, and headed for Mallibu

We arrived at our destination, the shrimp place in the Fast and the Furious,

Yummy

On the way back to Alex Phifer's we took Mulholland Hwy from the Pacific to the end of pavement. Wow.

 

...then almost home we saw this huge go cart facility from the freeway, we stopped by and they had a track made for drifting, for real. It was called slick track.