Hey Everybody, I hope this quick update finds you well and ready for fall weather?.. For me, it’s been absolutely flat-out lately in one form or another… The summer went by in a blink-of-an-eye and in talking to a lot of you, it sounds like it was that way for just about everyone…
After a really slow-start this year, work for me had picked up as the year went on and I’ve been spending a good amount of time over in Birmingham, teaching at the Porsche Sport Driving School. Great guys, awesome track and cars that are super-fun to drive, what more could a “car guy” ask for? In between trips to Alabama, I’ve been mixing in a good amount of Retail/Product Training for a few car manufactures and that’s always great because I’m able to teach people how to make more money and they’re always eager to learn that!
As for the DVM Mustang, lets just say we’ve been having our “challenges” these past few months… lol… As most of you know, we weren’t able to get it finished in time to get it out to Seattle so instead, I flew out there myself and completed the very-first “Start-&-Park” in Formula Drift history… It seems like a crazy thing to have to do but because of how the series rules are structured, to make sure I’d be in a position to retain my competition license for 2016, I had to make an appearance at the event. I was able to strike a deal with local Seattle driver Zach Farrar who had an FD Pro-legal car that he loaned me to make a single lap during Qualifying. That’s all I had to do so we made our lap and headed home having “attended”…
Next up on the FD calendar was Texas. I was really looking forward to this event as I had been able to win there back in the old “XDC days” so I knew the track and thought it be a great chance to do well. Through no fault of our own, some parts didn’t work out the way we needed them to and we ended up leaving Charlotte about 3-hours beyond our “drop-dead time”… Never wanting to give up, we knew I’d miss all of practice but we pushed on thinking I could again “pull a rabbit out of my hat” and do something amazing in Qualifying… With a car that I had yet to drive at that point… What could possible go wrong, right?
So with my-man Trip Robinson by my side, at 3 o’clock in the morning, with a car that Steven, Adam and the guys at 42 Autosports had taken only a couple of hours (that’s all we were able to give them) to pre-start & tune the new engine in what normally takes many-many more hours or even days, we put pedal-to-the-metal in our Ford Dually and headed off to Ft. Worth…
Trip and I figured that between the two of us, if we stopped only long enough for fuel (the truck and us), over the coarse of the 20-something hour drive, we surely should be able to make up 3-4 hours and get to Texas in time to get this all-new car through Tech and into line so I could make at least one miraculous qualifying pass… Well…. long story made short, after 4… yes that’s FOUR blown trailer tires, a monsoon rain storm that had Trip literally drifting the truck & trailer (yes and with me doing a lot of freaking out at that time, what with ALL of my worldly possessions in tow..), and a accident/traffic jam that had us setting dead on the interstate for I don’t know how long, we rolled into the Paddock there at Texas Motor Speedway 1-1/2 hours after Qualifying had ended… “Swing and a miss”…
The good news is we managed to get the car through Tech, we had the car on display all weekend so the world could see it actually did exists and everybody who saw the car loved it. Clearly not the ending I was shooting for but sometimes, things don’t always go your way so I’m grateful we made it here without any more trouble than we had…
After the weekend, I dropped Trip off at the airport and headed south for a few hours to stop by and see my friends at Late Model Restoration. Always great to see our DVM supporters face to face whenever I can. Add to that, the PR guys at LMR slid the car into their photo studio and took some amazing pictures of the car so that was an added surprise.
Once I got home I had a few correspondents with our friends at Formula D and they confirmed what I was afraid of, since we weren’t able to make a Qualifying pass at Texas, that meant that we did not “officially attend” the event and there for, we were ineligible to attend the season ending event at Irwindale. It’s times like these that make it hard on smaller teams that rely on contributions (be it time, dollars or materials) from others to move the program forward. Without sounding to demanding, it’s hard to get everyone involved to understand that things need to happen in a certain amount of time in order to meet certain timelines and even if they do understand, everyone has their own lives to live, so they can’t always help even if they want to. Why doesn’t everyone’s life revolve around drifting? I just don’t get it… 😉
Stay tuned for the next installment of “Hurry, Rush, Rush…. Get that car done”…
Talk to you later,
DV