Got invited to perform a Team Drift Demo with Just Drift at the Redline Time Attack race at the Big Willow track at Willow Springs this upcoming weekend on May 30-31 with my personal dual purpose Falken Tire Mazda RX-7. Along with the Drift demo, I am planning on competing in the Drift Class within the Time Attack Competition with the same car and the same Falken Azenis RT-615 tire compound. I am planning on performing only minor setting changes between the two disciplines. I am excited to see how my Drift FD3S will perform at the Big Willow track against the dedicated time attack cars out there. Stay tuned!

www.falkentire.com

www.redlinetimeattack.com

I had a pretty eventful Round 2 at Road Atlanta. I had some minor mechanical setbacks throughout the event that I had to deal with. The Falken team got there early for thurs practice. Right off the bat, during my first run, I ended up snapping both my rear axles. The Garage Boso crew quickly replaced the axles so that I could get some practice in for that day. We found out the car had some handling issues so we decided to make a few alignment changes for the next day.

Friday’s schedule consist of one 1-hour practice and then we went straight into qualifying. Wanting to get as many runs in with the short practice session to test the changes, I got to line up first in line. During the first run, the car ended up breaking the right rear spindle, right at initiation. Had to get the car towed off course. The Boso crew worked feverishly to replace all of the broken parts. We ended up missing the entire practice session and had to go straight into qualifying. Being the first run of the day with multiple changes to the suspension and brakes, I decided to just laid down a conservative first run, just get a score in. I pushed it on my second qual run but ended up pushing a bit too hard and spun. So I had to sit on my first low score and ended up claiming that 32nd spot which set me up with Tanner in Top 32 tandem on Sat.

I followed first and stayed with him tight for the first half of the course. I got through the keyhole section quicker than him so I had to check up a bit to stay behind him going towards the downhill straight. I lost too much momentum leaving the keyhole which cause him to gap me a bit for the rest of the course. During my lead lap, I ran a clean run hitting all of my clips, but Tanner followed closely behind. Ended up losing the round, but felt like I pushed hard and gave a good effort. Next time I’m gonna just stay in it and pass him. It’s on for next round!

PAS April 2009

My Falken FD3S is currently featured on this month’s April 2009 Performance Auto & Sound (PAS) mag. This issue has some pretty significant event coverages inside including: Tokyo Auto Salon and CES Show as well as a preview of the new Fast and Furious movie. The 5 page feature shows my RX-7 in competition spec at end of the 2008 Formula D season at Irwindale Speedway. I had a blast competing in my personal car all year. It’s nice to be able to see the car still all presentable in a magazine after a hard season battling around the country.

I would like to thank all of my sponsors and supporters that have help me along the way with this car:

Falken Tire Motorsports, MD-R / Motorsport Dynamics, GTwraps.com, Apexi, Rotary Extreme, Exedy, Seibon, APR Performance, Project Mu, Rays Engineering, Kaaz, Sparco, Vertex, Impact Engineering, Garage Boso, Cipher Garage, Mach III, Fatlace, Garage Inc, Rotary Engineering, Mazda.