This season has been by far the most trying in my drifting career. As im writing this, round 2 of the Evergreen Drift pro-am championship is just getting underway, and instead of unloading the rig and lining up for tech, im sitting at my desk.
Hopefully some of you noticed I wasn’t at round one either. From the very first practice day of this year, the team and I have been plagued with engine issues that eventually culminated in needing to build an entirely new motor, one week before round one.
That didn’t happen, and we knew it wouldn’t. One week was just not enough time to pull the motor, source a new block, order and receive new parts, get machine work done, reassemble everything, and then set up a time with John Reed to get a fresh tune on the fresh motor. Everybody was disappointed we wouldn’t make round one, after all we waited the whole off-season and thought everything was in order, but in motorsports these things happen. So, round two was going to be our first competition day.
That didn’t happen either. Which brings me to another thing that does happen in motorsports quite often; things take way longer than expected. Due to mix ups with our machinist and the fact that we run a somewhat non-traditional motor, machine work took about 4 times longer than expected, and we actually still don’t have our block back yet, but last I heard it was going to be finished up early next week.
Once we get the block back in our hands things should move along rather quickly, because we shouldn’t have to wait on anyone else. Now it’s easy to see all of the negatives in this situation, but there have actually been lots of positives.
First off, we have amazing partners. Without the help from ASD motorsports and Brian Crower, we would’ve likely missed the entire five round season. Brian Crower supplied most of the internals for the new motor, and ASD made sure everything got to me as quickly as UPS could manage. John Reed Racing is ready to give us a fresh tune on our MoTeC M84, because this new motor will have some things the old one didn’t have.
Round three is in one month, and there is a lot to do between now and then but with the machine work nearing completion I’m confident that our ASD Motorsports/Falken Tire s13 will be back and better than it ever has been before.
