Eric O'Sullivan

The past couple of months have been pretty hectic between one thing and another so bare with me while I try and catch up with whats been going on during July.

Prodrift round 3 on the 26th June was supposed to be my return to the Irish drift scene but unfortunately things didn’t exactly go to plan. Having re painted the corolla and replaced all the broken and bent suspension pieces I arrived for the Friday test day eager to get back in the drivers seat of my own car.

However, I could immediately feel something wrong with the steering.It was getting stuck on full lock and not returning to centre making the car spin out on almost every corner.

After a couple of laps I decided to get under the car and have a look. Well over an hour later and after swapping out many parts it still wasn’t right, all I could do was work with it and hope for the best. I ran the final practice session only to have another set back when the passenger side engine mount failed. These are fully custom mounts made for to fit the F20 engine into the corolla so there was very little I could do to replace it.

After returning to the workshop and assessing the damage I made the decision not to retire from the event. Even with the mount repaired I didn’t feel confident with the steering especially when the first corner outer clip was a solid steel wall !. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of Long Beach when I last drove the car so I focussed on prepping Amy G’s FC Rx 7 for the amateur comp on saturday instead.

I must give a big thanks to Kev and the garage hachi crew for getting me some replacement parts to try and fix the car at a moments notice. The car is now almost back together with some new steering knuckles which should cure the problem and Im looking forward to testing it again at the next drift practice day in Mondello Park on the 31st.

Next on the Agenda was Formula Drift round 4 at Evergreen Speedway in Seattle. This is the event that I podiumed at last year and is one of my favorite tracks on the FD circuit. The flat out 4th gear bank is insane, the spectators here and their cars are awesome and there’s a real party atmosphere around the pits.

Landing late on Wednesday night I met up with the team and headed straight to Intec racing where the Hankook Tire GTR was receiving some fine tuning on the dyno. Myself and Robbie wimped out and left the rest of the Dynamic crew to it as we left for the hotel for some badly needed sleep !

Thursday was practice day and right off the bat the Subaru fealt  good around the big bank and much better through the infield than last year. Jason and the rest of the team had been working flat out figuring out the wiring issues that plagued us in New Jersey so with renewed confidence I pushed the car hard all day. The marks on the rear bumper at the end of the session were a good indication of just how well it was performing !.

Thursday night would see the official launch of the Apex Lexus SC430 in downtown Seattle but before that myslef and Kearnage with the rest of his Intec Racing crew headed for some go karting at Skykart . Needless to say, things got out of hand very quickly on track with myself, Kyle Pollard and Deane  pushing each other around. After our second session, where Kyle got airborne, Kearney broke another kart and I held up every one else trying to drift the entire track, we got on the road and headed for the Apex party in the city .

With Ryuji’s Sc parked out on the street under lights everyone knew Formula D was in town. There was a great turnout from all the FD crew who were treated to a preview screening of a short film showing much of the behind the scenes work that went into making the drift SC a reality. Big respect to Chuck and the entire Apex team for building something different, I’ve no doubt that after some development Ryuji will be back on the podium showing the American muscle powered machines how its done !.

Unfortunately I couldn’t take much advantage of the free bar Apex supplied since we were due at the track early Friday morning, we hit the road and made our way back to the hotel for the night .

Qualifying on Friday would prove to be a little frustrating. After another good practice session I lined up for my first run with the intention of getting an average score in the bag, just enough to make sure we would be in the top 32. For my second run I planned to go all out, aim high on the wall and nail all the clipping points but as I sat 3 cars back in the queue before the run there was a massive oil spill. Jeff Jones (Yellow RX7) took off from the line and left a massive trail of oil all the way to the first corner and around most of the track. If it wasn’t for Ian Fournier sitting in front of me it may not have been noticed but he got the track officials attention and they set to cleaning up the mess.

After 20 mins we were given the green light and Ian set off ahead of me on his second qualifying pass.He spun on the infield and word from his his Drift Safari crew was that there was still a huge amount of oil on the infield that hadn’t been moved, great !

The officials waved me on and I had to go for it regardless, the bank felt good but as soon as I dropped into the slower infield the car took off towards the wall with a huge amount of angle. I held on, dropped a gear and some how managed to get it back on line, it wasn’t pretty.  Strangely enough I received a higher score from the judges for my efforts which put me in 28th place and my first top 32 of the year.

We drew Chris Forsberg for top 32 so I spent friday evenings practice sessions running behind as many slower cars as I could in preparation for the battle.As usual, it was difficult to hold the subaru back without it dropping out of boost but with I managed some decent chasing runs and felt confident.

Sitting beside Chris at the line on saturday made a nice change from spectating in the spotters tower, I let him leave the line first and gave him some distance expecting to catch him by the end of the bank. About half way round I found a rhythm and began to close in when out of no where I see Chris parked up with big angle where I would usually be dropping a gear and nailing it down the bank for the infield.Even with a ton of brakes there was no way I could avoid hitting Chris without spinning so I let the car go round and the front right tagged the wall.

I could feel something was very wrong with the steering and sure enough a seriously bent tie rod meant that I couldn’t run again, my day was over.

I didn’t dwell on the incident after that, not until I saw Dai Yoshihara run behind Chris in top 16 and perform a mirror image of what I’d done, even down to bending a right side tie rod ! It would appear that it was Chris’s tactics to pile on a lot of angle and kill his speed at this point on the track. Chris is a really cool guy and is undoubtedly a worthy FD champion. However, there’s nothing cool about employing tactics to upset a chasing driver when he’s committed in 4th gear beside a cement wall; Taka’s injury was a stark reminder of this. As my fellow Irish Prodrift competitors will agree, pulling a stunt like this back home would result in the slower car becoming a buffer between you and that wall. Next time I’ll make sure that we both need to take a 5 minute rule!!

My Irish FD comrade Dean Kearney was also unlucky not to progress to the Top16, so we made our way to the spotters tower and watched the rest of the event unfold. Drama almost all the way through with our boy Freddy Aasbo knocking out JR and Darren making it to the podium for third place. Seattle was once again an amazing event for the fans and Im sure they all left happy.

We have some more plans for the subaru which should be implemented before the next event in Las Vegas and I’ve more seat time planned right here at home in the corolla . If it all goes to plan, hopefully I can get back up on the FD podium at what should be a very fast and extremely hot track in sin city next month.