Americans like to watch celebrities operate outside their comfort zone, which is why millions of us tune in to watch former Dallas Cowboy Emmitt Smith try to be Fred Astaire on Dancing with the Stars. But if there's any group of celebrities that deserve to be thrown out of context, it's NASCAR Nextel Cup drivers.
This past August 31, the worlds of NASCAR and drifting collided, and to no one's surprise Irwindale Speedway was the impact zone. Located in eastern Los Angeles County, 35 miles from the beach, the half-mile oval was built for regional NASCAR competition but has become North America's signature venue for drifting. It's American motorsports' premiere venue for creative decontextualization.
The "Mopar D1 All-Star Duel presented by ShiftIntoGear" promised a titanic battle between some of NASCAR's best driving talent (in Southern California for the Sony HD 500 at California Speedway) and the wacky upstarts of the drifting world as presented in the Japanese-based D1 Professional Drift Grand Prix Series. Its tongue-twisting name alone indicated the corporate interests involved, but the event was organized as a benefit for NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne's charitable foundation, which in turn would distribute the net receipts to charities like the Ronald McDonald House, Racing for a Reason and the Victory Junction Gang Camp.
Was it much of a duel? Well...a lot of fans showed up that Thursday night expecting one.
The 10,000-spectator audition
Even with temperatures spiking toward 100 degrees, a few dozen fans were lined up to get into the speedway two hours before the gates opened at 4 p.m. — and going by the T-shirts on display, about half were there as drift fans and half as NASCAR loyalists.
"We're genuine NASCAR fans and drifting looks interesting," said Brian Healy of nearby Whittier, who was at the front of the line with his wife Marie and soon-to-be-9-years-old son Bob. "And we got sick of watching hillbillies drive in circles." Since they were dressed in matching Tony Stewart jerseys, claimed to attend the NASCAR races at Irwindale almost weekly and were planning to spend the next three days at California Speedway, that hillbilly comment has to be taken ironically. But their enthusiasm for the novelty of drifting seemed genuine.
"I want to see how many of the NASCAR guys hit the wall," shouted one drift fan, his words just audible over the black Aerospatiale helicopter dropping off a few Nextel Cup drivers in time for some practice. And not hitting the wall had to be among the primary concerns for those NASCAR drivers. After all, virtually none of them had ever been to a drifting event, few had much familiarity with drifting beyond a hazy notion. Drifting demands they fight every control instinct ever drilled into them and they'd be driving borrowed cars. It was like auditioning for Swan Lake without ever having taken a ballet lesson and doing it in front of 10,000 people. If nothing else, the NASCAR drivers had to want to escape with their dignity intact.
Preparation station
While the fans were lining up, in the pits the drift and Nextel Cup drivers were getting familiar with one another and the cars they'd pilot. Kasey Kahne was there of course, and as a Dodge driver in NASCAR it was natural for him to wind up in Samuel Hubinette's Mopar-sponsored drifting Viper for the event. Robby Gordon, whose off-season race truck is sponsored by the Red Bull energy drink, would take the wheel of Rhys Millen's Red Bull-sponsored Pontiac GTO for the drift exhibition while Bill Elliott wound up in a Falken Tire-sponsored Infiniti G35 coupe and Casey Mears and Scott Wimmer shared Falken's Mazda RX-7.
The big problem came with finding seats for Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle, both of whom drive Fords in Nextel Cup and had to be in Fords for the drifting. So two days before the event Eric Cheney, who owns Xtreme Mustang Performance took his own 500-horsepower 2005 Mustang GT street-bound car and converted it over to a drift machine for Kenseth and Biffle to share. "Two days ago," he said while frantically pasting various sponsor decals to the blue pony car, "I was driving this to work."
With the NASCAR drivers short on time from various other sponsor and racing commitments, their practice time didn't amount to much more than a few familiarization laps. They were running a shortened course restricted to within the half-mile oval's infield, and while getting sideways was easy for most of them, staying that way wasn't. The one exception was Bill Elliott, at 50 the senior citizen of the group, who seemed a natural drifter — as at home sliding on Irwindale's asphalt as he would be back in Georgia riding the cushion on a red clay bull ring.
The professional drifters, on the other hand, were nothing less than spectacular with America's Millen, Hubinette, Tanner Foust, Chris Forsberg, Vaughn Gittin Jr. and Calvin Wan doing luscious, smoky slides either singly or in packs alongside such Japanese drivers as Tatsuya Sakuma, Toshika Yoshioka, Takahiro Ueno and Hideo Hiraoka on a longer and much faster course that included about half the banked oval track. If there was going to be a "Drift vs. Grip" duel, the NASCAR guys' slingshots were up against machine guns.
Duel? What duel?
Once the crowds snagged some autographs and grabbed free samples of every energy drink in the known universe, the main event got underway. It was great fun, but hardly a duel.
Through three rounds of exhibition runs the NASCAR guys stayed on the smaller course while the D1ers blazed the big track. There was no time when the drifters were out with Cup racers simultaneously, and there was no formal competition between. Some duel.
With his extensive off-road racing background, expectations were that Robby Gordon would have little problem picking up the drifting drift. In practice he showed promise, but he never made it past the first corner as he immediately stuffed the right side of Millen's Pontiac into some concrete K-rail. The GTO limped back to the infield staging area with Millen now facing the almost impossible challenge of fixing the car and shipping it across the country in time for the following weekend's Formula D event in New Jersey (he made it, and finished 9th there). After one impressive run, Elliott's Infiniti croaked, knocking "Awesome Bill" down to spectator for the rest of the night.
All the NASCAR guys got significantly better at drifting as the night progressed, with Kahne doing a particularly impressive job of keeping Hubinette's Viper permanently askew. Kahne earned the 1st-place trophy that night, then went on to win both the Busch Grand National and Nextel Cup races that weekend.
Asked if it was tougher than he thought it would be, Matt Kenseth replied, "No, it's just as hard as I thought it would be," while his gaze followed the pro drifters around the track. "These guys have great car control."
Watching the NASCAR guys watch the drift pros at work was most revealing. Living in the traveling circus of NASCAR, these aren't the type of guys who are easily impressed; they are, after all, the heroes at any track they go to — except Irwindale on this night. While they got to try a little drifting, what they saw obviously impressed them. They were back being fans like everyone who bought a ticket.
Last call
If the paying spectators felt gypped at the lack of a real duel, they kept it to themselves. The applause was generous, the enthusiasm infectious and no one seemed to care about the results. And once the pro drifters finished their last group slide, even the guys in Dale Earnhardt T-shirts were on their feet and cheering as they climbed out of their cars and up the track's retaining fence.
And virtually everyone stayed long enough for Kasey Kahne to thank them and accept an oversize $30,000 check on behalf of his foundation. The conventional wisdom seems to be that this will likely become an annual event tied to Nextel Cup's late-summer Southern California appearance.
Robby Gordon's invite may, however, be lost in the mail. Instead, look for Robby on Dancing with the Stars.
This past August 31, the worlds of NASCAR and drifting collided, and to no one's surprise Irwindale Speedway was the impact zone. Located in eastern Los Angeles County, 35 miles from the beach, the half-mile oval was built for regional NASCAR competition but has become North America's signature venue for drifting. It's American motorsports' premiere venue for creative decontextualization.
The "Mopar D1 All-Star Duel presented by ShiftIntoGear" promised a titanic battle between some of NASCAR's best driving talent (in Southern California for the Sony HD 500 at California Speedway) and the wacky upstarts of the drifting world as presented in the Japanese-based D1 Professional Drift Grand Prix Series. Its tongue-twisting name alone indicated the corporate interests involved, but the event was organized as a benefit for NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne's charitable foundation, which in turn would distribute the net receipts to charities like the Ronald McDonald House, Racing for a Reason and the Victory Junction Gang Camp.
Was it much of a duel? Well...a lot of fans showed up that Thursday night expecting one.
The 10,000-spectator audition
Even with temperatures spiking toward 100 degrees, a few dozen fans were lined up to get into the speedway two hours before the gates opened at 4 p.m. — and going by the T-shirts on display, about half were there as drift fans and half as NASCAR loyalists.
"We're genuine NASCAR fans and drifting looks interesting," said Brian Healy of nearby Whittier, who was at the front of the line with his wife Marie and soon-to-be-9-years-old son Bob. "And we got sick of watching hillbillies drive in circles." Since they were dressed in matching Tony Stewart jerseys, claimed to attend the NASCAR races at Irwindale almost weekly and were planning to spend the next three days at California Speedway, that hillbilly comment has to be taken ironically. But their enthusiasm for the novelty of drifting seemed genuine.
"I want to see how many of the NASCAR guys hit the wall," shouted one drift fan, his words just audible over the black Aerospatiale helicopter dropping off a few Nextel Cup drivers in time for some practice. And not hitting the wall had to be among the primary concerns for those NASCAR drivers. After all, virtually none of them had ever been to a drifting event, few had much familiarity with drifting beyond a hazy notion. Drifting demands they fight every control instinct ever drilled into them and they'd be driving borrowed cars. It was like auditioning for Swan Lake without ever having taken a ballet lesson and doing it in front of 10,000 people. If nothing else, the NASCAR drivers had to want to escape with their dignity intact.
Preparation station
While the fans were lining up, in the pits the drift and Nextel Cup drivers were getting familiar with one another and the cars they'd pilot. Kasey Kahne was there of course, and as a Dodge driver in NASCAR it was natural for him to wind up in Samuel Hubinette's Mopar-sponsored drifting Viper for the event. Robby Gordon, whose off-season race truck is sponsored by the Red Bull energy drink, would take the wheel of Rhys Millen's Red Bull-sponsored Pontiac GTO for the drift exhibition while Bill Elliott wound up in a Falken Tire-sponsored Infiniti G35 coupe and Casey Mears and Scott Wimmer shared Falken's Mazda RX-7.
The big problem came with finding seats for Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle, both of whom drive Fords in Nextel Cup and had to be in Fords for the drifting. So two days before the event Eric Cheney, who owns Xtreme Mustang Performance took his own 500-horsepower 2005 Mustang GT street-bound car and converted it over to a drift machine for Kenseth and Biffle to share. "Two days ago," he said while frantically pasting various sponsor decals to the blue pony car, "I was driving this to work."
With the NASCAR drivers short on time from various other sponsor and racing commitments, their practice time didn't amount to much more than a few familiarization laps. They were running a shortened course restricted to within the half-mile oval's infield, and while getting sideways was easy for most of them, staying that way wasn't. The one exception was Bill Elliott, at 50 the senior citizen of the group, who seemed a natural drifter — as at home sliding on Irwindale's asphalt as he would be back in Georgia riding the cushion on a red clay bull ring.
The professional drifters, on the other hand, were nothing less than spectacular with America's Millen, Hubinette, Tanner Foust, Chris Forsberg, Vaughn Gittin Jr. and Calvin Wan doing luscious, smoky slides either singly or in packs alongside such Japanese drivers as Tatsuya Sakuma, Toshika Yoshioka, Takahiro Ueno and Hideo Hiraoka on a longer and much faster course that included about half the banked oval track. If there was going to be a "Drift vs. Grip" duel, the NASCAR guys' slingshots were up against machine guns.
Duel? What duel?
Once the crowds snagged some autographs and grabbed free samples of every energy drink in the known universe, the main event got underway. It was great fun, but hardly a duel.
Through three rounds of exhibition runs the NASCAR guys stayed on the smaller course while the D1ers blazed the big track. There was no time when the drifters were out with Cup racers simultaneously, and there was no formal competition between. Some duel.
With his extensive off-road racing background, expectations were that Robby Gordon would have little problem picking up the drifting drift. In practice he showed promise, but he never made it past the first corner as he immediately stuffed the right side of Millen's Pontiac into some concrete K-rail. The GTO limped back to the infield staging area with Millen now facing the almost impossible challenge of fixing the car and shipping it across the country in time for the following weekend's Formula D event in New Jersey (he made it, and finished 9th there). After one impressive run, Elliott's Infiniti croaked, knocking "Awesome Bill" down to spectator for the rest of the night.
All the NASCAR guys got significantly better at drifting as the night progressed, with Kahne doing a particularly impressive job of keeping Hubinette's Viper permanently askew. Kahne earned the 1st-place trophy that night, then went on to win both the Busch Grand National and Nextel Cup races that weekend.
Asked if it was tougher than he thought it would be, Matt Kenseth replied, "No, it's just as hard as I thought it would be," while his gaze followed the pro drifters around the track. "These guys have great car control."
Watching the NASCAR guys watch the drift pros at work was most revealing. Living in the traveling circus of NASCAR, these aren't the type of guys who are easily impressed; they are, after all, the heroes at any track they go to — except Irwindale on this night. While they got to try a little drifting, what they saw obviously impressed them. They were back being fans like everyone who bought a ticket.
Last call
If the paying spectators felt gypped at the lack of a real duel, they kept it to themselves. The applause was generous, the enthusiasm infectious and no one seemed to care about the results. And once the pro drifters finished their last group slide, even the guys in Dale Earnhardt T-shirts were on their feet and cheering as they climbed out of their cars and up the track's retaining fence.
And virtually everyone stayed long enough for Kasey Kahne to thank them and accept an oversize $30,000 check on behalf of his foundation. The conventional wisdom seems to be that this will likely become an annual event tied to Nextel Cup's late-summer Southern California appearance.
Robby Gordon's invite may, however, be lost in the mail. Instead, look for Robby on Dancing with the Stars.
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