In my last post at the first round of the Spec-D Pro Series, I spoke about the importance of a home track. For round two of the competition however, we would be competing somewhere completely new to us: Mission Raceway Park. Rick has been there before, but otherwise we had no real idea of what we were about to walk into. Are there any facilities on site? Any hardware stores nearby in case we need last minute supplies? Are the pits really far from the stands? All of these were essentially unanswerable questions for us, so all we could do really was to just be prepared for anything to come our way. Both Rick and Matt drove out to Mission beforehand, but me and the rest of the RA crew flew in the morning of the event. Flying meant that we were limited to what we could bring, so this is where our past racing experience really came in handy. For the most part, if we needed anything extra we could pick it up there, but that would still mean potentially wasting time in an unfamiliar place if we ran into any car troubles. Thankfully the car held up just fine for the competition (not so much afterwards though), so it was just up to us and Rick to get everything dialed in together.

Rick’s car is powered by a 1JZ motor and makes all kinds of pops and bangs, however it is still down on power compared the majority of the field. This means that the driver must adapt and adjust, as seen here from the in-car footage posted on Rick’s YouTube. If you watch closely, Rick slowly changes his driving style throughout his practice runs to try and carry as much speed and angle as possible throughout the course. As drivers who are very familiar with driving underpowered cars to their limit, both me and Matt understand very well that the gap between a fast car and a slow car and be bridged by enough skill (to an extent). With drifting however, the course layouts are much shorter and only use a small portion of the full track. As a result there are a lot less opportunities and places where you can catch up with braking for example, making Rick’s job a lot harder. Everyone also lost about an hour of practice time after two heavy crashes, so that didn’t help either (thankfully everyone was okay and both teams involved pulled off some of the fastest repairs ever and managed to make it back in time for qualifying). As you’ll see towards the end of the video above, Rick eventually got into the grove of things and was ready to go for qualifying. On his first run though, he would make contact with the first outer wall, forcing him to make a correction which resulted in a score of 66. Not great, but certainly much better than the 49 that we went into competition with in round one. Rick’s second run was much cleaner, with no major corrections or mistakes being made which gave him a score of 78. This placed us in 14th place, which is actually fairly low on the qualifying ladder, but the competition was absolutely fierce this time around. No matter, we were in the main event which means that it was now time to get some dinner, get some rest, and try to formulate a plan for our tandem battle the next day against friend Chris Pollard.

For the main event day we had a bit more practice time and Rick was really able to get a good amount of seat time which helped improve his driving tremendously. Things were looking good and Rick seemed to be able to find more speed out of the car towards the end of practice, but we still had the problem of being paired up against Chris Pollard for our first tandem battle. For those who aren’t familiar, Chris drives an LS powered E46 BMW 3 Series, and as everyone in the crowd would later find out that night, he’s damn good at drifting. I also couldn’t really see any bad habits in Chris’ driving that we could try and exploit either, so all we could do really was just put our faith in Rick and also hope that maybe Chris’ prop shaft would explode like it did at Touge Bash (sorry Chris). No matter, Rick was driving phenomenally and the car had no issues, so we were all feeling good going into the main competition. Chris would go on however to do what he does best, and despite Rick having a great chase run, we were eliminated in the Top 16. A bit of a shame considering how well Rick was driving that weekend, but considering the huge amount of progress we made from Rick’s first practice run, it would still prove to be a very successful event for us.

The next day was the Bros Before Pros event which was just a casual open drift event. Rick was giving both our team and some fans a few ride-alongs until the rear diff in his car decided that it didn’t want to be a rear diff anymore and exploded. That sucked, but the car had made it past through three days of extreme heat and driving without any real signs of trouble, so we really couldn’t ask for more. Rest assured everything will be fixed and ready to go for the final round of competition on August 12th at Castrol Raceway.

Thank you to everyone who cheered us on, came over to chat and wish us luck, and to tell us that Rick’s car is the best looking one in the event. It really means a lot to us, especially when everyone is sleep deprived but still busting their ass to get things together. Also shoutout to Chris Pollard for the most exciting battle of the event later on that evening (maybe I’ll post this later on my Instagram).

Until next round!

-brandon.