Hello drift fanatics!
Alain from Team Speed Industries here. I’ll give you a quick rundown of the happenings at this years KD Race which, like every year, took place at Anneau du Rhin racetrack. We were looking forward to this event for some time now, since the organizers from Team MSO are such an awesome group and they manage year after year to offer a Motorsport and Drifting Festival that gets thousands of visitors.
One thing that makes this event special is that the qualifications and battles start at 5 PM and run right into the night! Now if drift battling at night on a non-illuminated track isnt cool then I dont know what is.
Gloomy mood while drifting at the annual KD Race
We arrived on track Friday afternoon a bit earlier to build up our tent and unload the drift machines. First thing we noticed was the extreme heat! We were melting,it was the first time this year where I truly felt like I was sitting inside a toaster with my pants on fire.
You can see Team Speed Industries hard at work building up our pit area.
Representing the Team today were three of our drivers.
Mr. Speed Industries himself – Tobias Welti in his JDM Silvia PS13 which is held together entirely by zipties, ductape and awesomeness.
Mr.Speed Industries himself – Tobias Welti
We drove this PS13 hard on Ebisu, Japan before Tobias took it to compete at KD Race
Later on, our prime rookie Don Icon in his R32 Skyline would be joining us as well.
Don Icon preparing his racecam
His Skyline is running a RB25 with a few extra ponies
I would be using my trusty mean green battle machine, the S14.
Fake smile FTW!!!
The green turd ready for training
We also joined forces with two other Swiss drifters who happened to be tenting right next to us. Philippé was running in the amateur class with his very clean S14a.
After the tents were up and the BBQ was ready, we mended the cars a little bit and went over to the first briefing.
Briefing
Briefing was special since it was all in French so we didnt understand much really.
Luckily, Nicolas Koenig (another awesome dude fromTeam MSO) spoke English and filled us in on the details.
Nicolas Koenig from MSO did some translating for us
Basically, you build up speed on a long straight and go into a high speed left / right sweeper which you drift in 3rdgear. After that theres a short straightway followed a pretty complex combination of 2nd gear corners which should all be connected directly.
First thing he mentioned was to be careful in the high speed 3rd gear sweepers, since its easy to roll the car there if you mess it up. For the first training runs, there would be no defined clipping points we needed to hit. Just go out, have fun and haul ass. Thats the way we like it!
Training
After checking out the track, we went right into training! It went more or less as youd expect, meaning none of our cars exploded and nobody smashed into the wall. However I had no idea what line to take since the entry was quite bizarre.
Dirtdrop!!!
You come flying up this slight uphill dip, with the sun glaring in your face. You cant see shit even with sunglasses on. Sweat is flowing in your eyes like an unpleasant salty waterfall and since the last bit before the entry is slightly uphill the actual corner you need to take isnt visible.
So what we did was just disable any common sense in our brains, fly in blindly like total lunatics and see what happens. Wohoo
My buddy Marc holding on tight for this ride!
The other swiss driver, Philippé burning hard out of the final corner
We could not get that many training runs done that night because there were so many people driving. I think Pro and Amateur class together boasted around 50 cars.
I did 8 laps on the track before training was over and I wasnt feeling confident at all. Hadn’t really managed to get a very good run in, and tried a few different lines (all of them were crap).
Tobias wasnt feeling much better, but mentioned he did 1 or 2 stints which werent all that bad.
Our third team member, runner-up Don Icon had not even arrived at this point. We predicted hed crap his pants on qualification day if he cant get at least a few training runs in today.
So things were not looking too promising for Team Speed Industries right now.
Some S13 competitors during training. Sparks galore!
We packed our things since it was 10pm and training had ended. Don Icon had finally arrived shortly before that and managed to get like 2 training laps in. He might as well have trained on his moms parking spot as you wont know how to drive this complex track after 2 laps, especially if youre a rookie.
Don Icon giving it the beans using his splendid 400hp skyline
Despite that, he seemed fully confident and relaxed. I could hardly believe it.
Night fell, we drove back to Zurich to recover from the hard day…