By John C. Naderi
"No Room for Mistakes," Formula D's tagline for its season opener straddled that delicate line between creative and cheesy. However you want to refer to it, this is a rather appropriate description as the imposing concrete K rails of the Long Beach street circuit offer almost no margin for error. This made for a potentially disastrous situation with the large number of new drivers, and fresh and newly refreshed cars on hand. It always hurts to see a virgin car go into the wall at the very first event. Fortunately, the carnage was mostly limited to car-to-car contact, which means that overall skill level as well as aggressive tactics are on the rise. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, we were deprived of seeing some of these new drivers and cars waging war on the tandem battlefield.
Be it lack of funding, lack of time, or just lack of effort, some teams couldn't get their new cars together in time for the first event of the season. Falken, with perhaps the strongest presence in the drift scene, may have finally bitten off more than it can chew as many of the team's new cars were reduced to display status. Hiro Sumida's 2JZ-GTE-powered IS 350, Ben Schwartz's LS V-8-powered Saturn Sky, and Seigo Yamamoto's jaw-dropping Speed Machine RX-8 did not debut on-track as expected. In addition to the cars not making the entry list, several high-profile drivers missed the cut for the sweet sixteen tandem pairings.
The Pacific Rim team, who shocked and amazed everyone when they announced the recent purchase of NOB Taniguchi's former HKS S15, showed up with Dai Yoshihara's dependable ride, the RHD S13, which continued to deliver up until the final round where he took Third place. HKS' Technical Support staff was on-hand to tune the S13 for the Long Beach track (part of the deal), and team owner Jerry Tsai says we can expect to see the debut of the S15 well before this issue even hits the stands; so sit tight. Chris Forsberg showed off his team spirit with a recent color change to his V-8 350Z, representing a big new sponsor for the year, Maxxis Tires.
Also big for this year's lineup was the large pool of Japanese (and former D1) competitors, like the '04 D1GP series champion, Ryuji Miki driving Yoichi Imamura's old A'PEXi RX-7 (now under the Team Bergenholtz banner and painted in the classic Bergenholtz CRX blue-white-yellow livery). Miki just missed the bubble tying for 17th spot with Ken Gushi. "Boney" Okubo, who drove the Signal R34 for the past couple of years, made the switch for Drift Speed's S15 Silvia, while Kazu Hayashida (formerly of Team RS*R Japan) stepped up to the plate for Mad K and his highly feared GT-R.
Other big names that didn't make it to the big game included our favorite Irish lad, Darren McNamara and his SR20-powered Levin (now colored in Falken's teal and turquoise), Calvin Wan, Taka Aono, Tony Angelo (in Rod Millen's former RX-8), and Stephan Papadakis. Tanner "Foxy Tan Tan" Foust was the top qualifier in the sweet sixteen, followed closely by Vaughn Gittin Jr. and Kazu Hayashida.
JR and Samuel's battle was one of the finest displays of tandem drifting we've seen in a long time.
During the parade lap before the tandem action ensued Rich Rutherford lost the transfer case in his Tool Racing Evo and Samuel Hubinette destroyed the fuel pump on his Mopar Charger. Samuel's Nuformz crew was able to fix the Charger but Rich was SOL, which made him MIA for the first round.
Once the tandem got underway Ross Petty tagged Tan Tan's freshly refinished AEM/Memphis Audio 350Z and Tan Tan repaid the favor by sending Ross home early. Robbie Nishida put up a good fight against his Falken teammate JR, only succumbing to the Mustang after a tightly-contested One More Time. Japanese driver Mitsuru Haraguchi is a bit of a legend in underground drift circles but with only a handful of professional appearances he's also fairly unknown. In the Falken/Silk Road S13.5 Haraguchi made his intentions clear. He skimmed the wall on more than one occasion, never losing his composure or angle. At the end of the day there wasn't much remaining of Haraguchi's car, having left the bumper, taillights and rear wing on the circuit. It's hard to believe this was once an Import Tuner cover car, but then again, if one of our cars was on the cover of Tuner we'd drive it into a wall, also.