Day 2, we stopped in Billings, Montana… then it was off to Fargo, North Dakota for our 3rd night. The next morning it was a mad dash to Milwaukee. I didn’t do the best job of snapping photos the past few days. I got to do some driving, which was definitely rad. We spent a lot of time on back-roads running parallel to the interstates to avoid law contact.Here are a few random pics from the past few days:

85.5?

This Sunfire was sweet.

Hooman’s windsheild cracked… as did most of the other cars. It’s amazing how these cracks grow so fast.

This was our playbook. All our stops, the entire schedule, and all names/phone numbers. A cop in Idaho confiscated one of these books from a rallier… so they knew exactly where we were headed.

The guy who’s playbook got nabbed, got porn put on his Cayenne.

Today was the official start of the rally. Everyone was gathered outside our hotel in SLC. The entire group was ready to hit the road. We almost stopped traffic out in front of the hotel with all the cars.

After hours of anticipation, we hit the road with force. All the pent up energy waiting to leave showed… because when the rally hit the road, people were running 150mph, passing on the shoulder, passing between lanes, cutting people off… it was MADNESS!We were running in the front with the Infamous crew, and Chris… the founder of AKA (e39 M5).

Apparently, all the ruckus got the entire rally behind us pulled over at once. We managed to elude the stop. Once we crossed the state line into Idaho, we stopped at a gas station. We were soon followed by an Idaho state trooper. He told us he knew what we were doing in Utah… and not to do it in Idaho. He said they would have troopers every 10-15 miles. Sure enough – he was right.

After getting pulled over (sorry… no pix), having the car searched for NOS and drugs, we decided to take a back road that would take us up through Yellowstone Nat’l Park.

I’m calling this “Day 0”, because the rally hasn’t officially started yet. Today we hit Bonneville Speedway. It was AMAZING. Very VERY surreal. We didn’t get to run a top-speed run, because Hooman had a torn motor mount in the Evo VIII… but just being there was incredible! It was always a dream of mine to get out there… and the flats did nothing to disappoint me. It was simply amazing.

We left the speedway to head back to SLC to get the motor mount swapped at a local Mitsu dealer. Leaving the speedway… we snapped one of my favorite pictures:

We got the motor mount changed at a Mitsubishi dealer that probably had one service writer, and one technician. Once we left the dealer, we hit a K-Mart next door for some sweet pictures.

At that K-mart, I stumbled across a 1:24 scale that has been on the shelf since 2004…
and it cost me $2.13!

I was flying out to Salt Lake City to meet Hooman and the rest of the rally crew. When I got on the plane in Atlanta… Hooman called me and told me he was running late, and wouldn’t get to Salt Lake City in time to pick me up. He gave me his buddy Nick’s number so I could meet up with him. He was driving a new e60 M5:

He was with a lot of the other drivers in a parking garage putting graphics on all the cars:

After we left the garage, we headed to Wendover, which is a few miles from Bonneville Speedway. I wasn’t even off the plane an hour, and I was going 170mph in the Nick’s e60.

Tomorrow we head out to Bonneville Speedway for top-speed runs. I can’t wait!

Tomorrow I’m off to Salt Lake City today to begin the AKA Rally, co-driver for Hooman Mozaffari! He has some new goodies under the hood of his Evo VIII… so it’s going to be wild. The rally spans 6 days all the way to Atlantic City, NJ, with crazy stops along the way. I’m looking forward to running at the Bonneville Salt Flats!!!

I had an amazing weekend up in St. Louis with the Slide America BMW. The car performed beatifully, and the BFGoodrich tires were amazing! Gran Turismo East and Foerst Motorwerks helped set the car up for it’s first professional podium finish! This has been long overdue… and feels especially sweet considering I’m pushing half the horsepower!I won’t even get into how fierce the battles were… otherwise I will write an entire book. Let’s just say this weekend was BEYOND INSANE… and let the pictures do the talking..

After a day of “shaking the rust off”, I finished top-8 at Drift Fury in St. Louis at Gateway International Raceway!

I managed a top-8 finish in Cordele, GA this weekend for round 2 of the SCCA Drift Series at Watermelon Speedway! There was a questionable call made in regard to my opponent’s advancement, but a great event for sure!

I spent a few minutes on a retouch of a great photo from Formula Drift Atlanta last weekend.

If you’re the photographer who took this… please e-mail me – I want to give credit where credit is due. :)

The original:

Formula Drift events at Road Atlanta are always amazing. I ran in to some issues with a broken passenger-side control arm… which definitely threw a wrench into things. I mis-calculated my entry back into 10A, and spun… catching the inner lip of the passenger-side wheel on the inside of the rumble strip. It basically pulled on the wheel enough to destroy the inner bushing on the control arm. At first I thought my weekend was done… but Kieran from GTE and Erin Sanford ran up to Strictly German, which happens to be the largest BMW salvage yard I have ever seen. They managed to get an entire control arm & bushing back over to me, and Matt from Foerst Motorwerks got it swapped out on the hill. It was INSANE.

After all of that, I managed to initiate my fastest entry into 10A… I didn’t lift the entire way down the hill… I was hellbent and pissed off, and I remember thinking “I hope this works”… then stabbing the clutch as hard as I could. I didn’t end up qualifying Top-32… but I gave that track hell considering the circumstances. So overall, it was an amazing weekend..

I will be competing in the 2nd round of the SCCA Formula Drift Series at Road Atlanta! I’m super excited to get back out on that track. Hopefully there will be no technical difficulties with the car this year. :)

See you all at the track!

What started out as a simple retouch for a sticker, turned into an all out Photoshop-a-thon. It was kinda cool applying some of the techniques I learned through doing retouching for Vanity Fair at work.

Thanks to Joey Redmond, for snapping the original photo.

This is going to be the sticker that will double as my new business card.
(Screen captured from CMYK):

Since this event was the last of the championship series, all of the DriftMechaniks crew decided we would dress up in thrift-store business suits, and rock out the last event of the season with some style.

Unfortunately there was a horrific accident, in which a photographer was struck by an understeering drift car. The event was cancelled after the accident, and with good reason. We all wish him a speedy recovery… and REALLY hope he is okay.

Join host Charity Hodges and the Nopi Tunervision crew as they cover the Batlground Drift Demos at the 2006 Nopi Nationals Motorsports Supershow! See Daniel Willie, Tracy Shayhorn, Erin Sanford, and Andy Sapp ignite drifting mayhem for the 100,000 screaming fans at Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia.

Simply an amazing weekend. The 2006 Nopi Nationals drift demos were an enormous hit! With over 100,000 people in attendance, this was by far the largest show we have done to date. Words can’t really describe how amazing things went.

HUGE HUGE thanks to Kieran from Gran Turismo East for such amazing support over the weekend! The BFGoodrich G-Force Sport tires performed absolutely flawlessly. I couldn’t have driven past the limit without them, or their support!

.

.

.

.

.