Sorry I haven’t been updating my journal lately. I’ve been SUPER busy getting my car ready for Atlanta Georgia. Anyways, to get you up to speed, I wasn’t planning on going to Atlanta… then all of the sudden, Hot Import Nights and Hot Wheels decided that they wanted to sponsor me for transportation! I couldn’t pass this up, of course and I started getting my car into good running shape for the event.
So the first thing I needed to do was get a cage. And my favorite friend in the entire world, Richard (JDM Rice) was such a sweety (:-*) and let me take out his and put it in my car. That wasn’t very fun, especially since all but 2 of the 20 bolts on the car were STRIPPED. And when I say stripped, I don’t mean you take em off and you say… great – they’re stripped. Because these didn’t even come off. The nuts would just spin in place. Good thing Marc was there the whole afternoon to help me take them off… We resorted to using brute force and we took hammers and broke the bolts off at the nut. Which made us bloody, sweaty, and tired. A couple days later we spend an entire night taking out all my old interior and putting in the new cage, then putting in my new seat.
Other than that, I changed my oil, my LSD oil, looked for leaks… replaced a power steering line, flushed my coolant, and then and made sure all my fluids were topped off. My intercooler has a big a** crack in it from the accident… but, since I didn’t have the time or money (doesn’t get any better than that), I couldn’t replace it… I just planned on competing with the huge boost leak. To make my car look a little better, Jerry from Pacific Rim and Clay from Autolink helped me make some bling stickers for the car… And PJ Bonafacio painted my aero bumper that I’ve had sitting in my garage for the last year or so (I’m lazy).
So anyway, we get to Atlanta to visit Nadine’s grandma… she was sooo nice, and she took us sight-seeing to all of her favorite places. It was awesome, and I wasn’t missing ghetto LA for a minute. At first, I thought that I was gonna get lynched or tar and feathered, but I realized that we were safe when I found out there were 2 asian restaurants in town (imagine that!).
The next day started, and I wasn’t driving very well. In fact, I went way too hot into my first lap and I went straight into the rocks just outside of turn 1. The car was okay, but my wheels got all scratched up from the rocks (I like to refer to it as custom sand-blasting). My lip spoiler flew off and it’s funny, because the crowd loved seeing body parts fly off. They thought it was awesome when I was heading back towards the pit area, and I stopped in front of them to pick it up off the ground. No! You can’t have my lip spoiler!!! Anyway, my problem was I knew everything that I should have been doing… but it seemed like I wasn’t listening to myself. I was taking horrible line into turn 1 over and over and over again… at least I was consistent! Haha! Qualifying round came around and my line was a little better but not much… and still almost mirror image of what I was doing the entire time during practice. I qualified as one of the top 16 drivers, so I went on to the next round. Again, I did the same thing as I was doing all weekend, and it really messed me up while I was doing tandem with Hiroo… my entry style into turn 1 was horrible, and it made me fall way behind… I need a lot of practice when it comes to tandem… you’d think that you just go, but when youre drifting tandem, you’re in a whole other world of drifting. There’s a lot of strategy involved, a lot of adjustments, and change of attack that you just don’t get when you’re drifting alone. Hopefully I will get to have some more practice at it in the near future.
Needless to say, my driving wasn’t very good, but I had a GREAT time fooling around with the other drivers in the pit area. We’re all great buddies and I’m happy that our drifting culture is so good that we can totally have fun and goof around when we are all there to compete with each other. Thank you Nadine, Alex, and Marc for going with me… you guys helped out SO MUCH and there’s no way I would have had a good time or even felt right competing without you guys there with me. I’d have it no other way… thanks for all the support! And THANK YOU to Hot Wheels and Hot Import Nights for sponsoring me transportation, because without your help I’d never be able to even fathom going across the country and drift on the other side of the country! Thanks to all the GREAT people in Georgia who came out to watch us all drift! You were all so nice and great people… thanks for coming up to say hi to me and making me feel important! Team Hevnz, thank you so much for cheering me on and taking the time out to make a sign for me even though I sucked hardcore!
Here’s a link to the gallery from the trip… as you can tell, there aren’t a whole lot of driving pictures… I wonder why?
http://www.sileightymania.com/photosvideo/formulad_round1/
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