Some of you may remember from last year that Rick Selinske, along with the RA Motorsports team and myself, competed together in the Spec-D Pro Series drifting competition. We certainly learned a lot throughout the season, steadily increasing our qualifying position each round but alas was unable to advance past the Top 16 bracket, even when it seemed like victory was within our grasp. This year the team was unable to compete in the season due to multiple schedule conflicts, but thankfully 881 Crew filled the competition void for us with Southern Bout, held at our favourite Stratotech Park. Thanks to our commitments with DMS Timing we are out there quite regularly these days and very familiar with the various layouts and configurations that Stratotech allows, and Rick himself had been busy driving more than ever lately, gaining tons of both experience and confidence behind the wheel. We were ready.

The layout for the weekends competition utilized both return roads on Stratotech, meaning that for the most part the playing field was rather level; the short course didn’t really give anyone too much of a power advantage (unless you were driving a certain V8 powered FR-S), but even so we had to bring our A-game if we didn’t want to get knocked out early on. As you’ll soon see below, this time around I decided to focus more on being a team photographer instead of an event photographer (sorry everyone else), which allowed me to be more involved in the teams activities. I won’t dive into details, but experimenting with different car settings and discussing strategy with Rick would later prove to be invaluable. Saturday practice went off without a hitch as did Sunday mornings practice session, and with a qualifying score of 79 which put us in eight position, we were ready to do battle with anyone that we got matched up against. First up: Justin Breau in his LS powered E36.

Now even though the short course helped us out a lot with being able to keep up with the higher powered LS boys, we still had to make some adjustments and be careful to make sure that not just anyone would take us to Gapplebees when exiting turn one. Let me also say that everyone that qualified was driving extremely well, so winning would not be easy, as we very quickly found out after both Rick and Justin were given a one-more-time by the judges. To be honest I thought we had won it after the first series of battles, but we were more than happy to go for another round. After a quick check on the car we were ready to go again, but as it turns out Justin had to replace a tie rod after making some contact with Rick earlier on, and I couldn’t help but suspect that this would be our key advantage; there would be no time to do a proper alignment, so after giving some words of encouragement to Rick and pointing out that Justin’s car would most likely be toed out, the two drivers did battle one again and hell yes we were finally able to break our Top 16 curse and move onto the Top 8 (sorry Justin).

Our next opponent was Jason Webb who was piloting the right hand drive Ford Mustang convertible (imported from South Africa). After watching his initial battle we knew we had our work cut out for us, but hey, it’s a Mustang, so if we’re lucky maybe it would just slide off towards the crowd instead right? Nope. Despite a great effort from Rick, Jason was able to knock us out after a couple mistakes were made and ended our day there. Damn. It sucked to lose but all things considered I think both Rick and the team did an amazing job together, and the car didn’t skip a beat. Even though this was our only competition together this season, we were still able to pool together everything we had learned last year and just like that improved our position at the end of the day. All in all I would still consider it a success.

As always I would like to thank everyone who came to help out, all the fans that swung by the pits to show their support, and to the 881 Crew for organizing such a fun event for everyone in attendance.

Hope you all enjoy all these pictures of the best looking car in the competition.

-brandon.