EVENTS: DriftMania Day 1

I had been looking forward to Driftmania for the whole summer, and it happened to land on the very first warm weekend we had in Toronto. Prior to this it has been all rain and cool temperatures, which made for great drifting events on every on/off-ramp around the GTA but hardly prime to get crowds out and get fans amped up. The sun Gods were appeased though and DMCC brought their own heat with them! For more coverage hit below the cut…

I’ll skip the coverage of umbrella girls and rice rockets since we see plenty of those all throughout the summer across every other crap blog out there. I’m here to bring you the best action photos I can! Saturday’s practice sessions were at about 80% of what I felt the drivers would wind up going for. The crowd was much smaller than past years, and the weather was very very hot. That said, the drivers were still putting on a good show for the crowds when the Pro session started late in the afternoon sun. Here’s Spooky in the BFG GTO pouring th power in as she comes hard into initiate turn 1 infront of the judges. This was by far the best sounding car at the event!

She was getting very consistent angles in practice and had little trouble dominating a few of the runs she did. Big V8s are always a hoot to watch.

Justin from Intense Motorsports came into turn one hot and the car he was following was going too slow so he had to ease off which unfortunately put him into the cement barrier at about 110km/h. He was thankfully unhurt, but obviously a bit pissed. You can see in the image above that the impact was tail first which spun his front left corner into the barrier hard. This shot shows the damage done to the poor RPS13′s front end. Unfortunately the frame was about 6.5 inches removed from spec. The Intense Motorsports guys spent the evening straightening the frame using two big trucks (!!!) and SG Motorsports lent them their shop to align the car in preparation for the next day.

The rest of practice went smoothly with everyone putting in a fairly even number of killer runs and spins. The drivers were likely a bit unnerved by the un-evenness at the entry of turn one. Right after transitioning the cars were definitely lifting wheels and bouncing around going hard into turn one, which likely contributed to the car Jason was following slowing down, putting him into a wall. Here’s the other BFG GTO lifting a wheel entering turn 1.

Infinity has always made convertibles right?

What do you do when you’re practicing so hard the engine starts to overheat? Remove body panels until the problem goes away. In this case, one large panel.

Both the Pro and AM guys did the drift scene justice with some great decoration and mascots. This 240 had a pickup rear end and a Burger King along for the ride.