America's Wildest Drifter Takes Us On a Serious Ride With This V8-Powered Nissan Z
It was during a pre-game warm-up session for the '04 US D1GP event at the Irwindale Speedway that we first met Chris Forsberg. At the time, we didn't know much about the recent transplant from Pennsylvania other than he'd been brought over by Signal Auto to join their US drift team along with Chunky Bai and Atsushi Kuroi (who were driving the Sileighty twins). Chris' 350Z was rumored to have been the first to have a SR20DET dropped into its engine bay. That day, he not only impressed us, but a handful of media and other Japanese D1 drivers who were watching from the infield that morning. For a young, lanky, clean-cut white kid coming from the East Coast literally unknown, this was unexpected, especially when there were names like Nomuken and Taniguchi that we were just starting to get familiar with. So how did Chris Forsberg transform from virtual zero to drifting hero?
Crafting his skills for a better part of the past six years, you could blame a certain Japanese anime cartoon for giving Chris the inspiration to get a car sideways. "I'd watch Initial D videos with my friend (and teammate), Tony Angelo," he says. "After goofing around for a while trying to become better drivers, Tony came up with the idea for a drift crew called Drift Alliance, which I eventually joined and am currently the VP of. I dropped everything in my life to pursue a career in drifting, and sold all of my crap to start building a car." Dubbed Drift Alliance in homage to the rebels from the Star Wars film (Tony thought of this new group of drifters as a rebel alliance), Chris and the crew developed a reputation as the eastern coast's pioneers of drift, creating their own brand of high-speed, sideways tactics to rival their peers on the Westside. "We didn't care that California had the best cars or the best events," he explains. "We made our own parts and basically did our own thing, so we didn't really need the West Coast for anything. The West Coast was more like the Empire to us." Before long, Chris and the Drift Alliance were being invited to organized drift events, and took on the BeaveRun track just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for their first outing as professional drifters; Chris was then driving a SR20-swapped FC3S RX-7.
Chris' drifting life took an unexpected but bumpy detour when Signal Auto stepped into town for a drifting exhibition at New Jersey's Englishtown Raceway late in October '03. Kousuke Kida, Signal's president, had caught word that Chris was already planning to move to California a few days after the event finished and decided to take Chris under his wing, hoping to show the drift world his undiscovered talent in addition to the one-two knockout punch of Chunky and Kuroi. All Kousuke asked of Chris was to give him a call when he got into town where a job would be waiting for him at Signal USA. Chris truthfully admits, "Although I learned a lot during my time with Signal, it was Tony and I who figured out how to get the SR running in my Z without having to spend tons of money on fabrication. When Formula D announced its event series, I found that the support I felt I would need in order to perform successfully wasn't at all what I anticipated [at Signal]. I spent all of my money moving to Cali, living in different hotels just to build this drift car and suddenly I was placed in a position where the monetary support just wasn't there." This turn of events forced Chris into an uncomfortable situation, which left him no choice but to look towards another direction, a road that would land him on MotoRex's door step.