Formula Drift 2011

Towards the end of last year, my friend Jack one day asked me if I was interested to go for a drift event. I automatically said yes and we were suppose to go for the qualifying on Saturday. However, it rained on that day and because I had a wedding to attend in the evening, I decided to go on a Sunday instead. The best thing about knowing people is you can get stuff like...

Oh yea baby that is Media pass to the event, basically it grants us almost all access to the entire racing area. Big thanks to The Car Guys for giving us the media pass. There were special media areas and we could even go to the pits. The only thing we couldn't go to were the track itself. We made the best of the media pass and first went to where most of the media were camped out.

We got very close to the action and I managed to get some nice drifting action. We were there not more then 15 minutes and the event had their first casualty. I didn't actually catch the car hitting the barrier but when I saw him coming into the corner, I realised instantly that no way he was going to make it. This was the results....

The car was unfortunately trashed and had to be towed away. The driver did however get a rousing applause as he was towed away. Not too long after one of our Malaysian drivers suffered a huge tyre blow out just as he was about to start drifting. He spun right in front of us.

What was really refreshing is the guy that he was racing, got off his car and shook hands with TTW (Malaysian Driver)

After a while, I decided to get creative and do some panning shots. I wanted to get some panning shots with blur tyres (to show the car was moving).

I was pretty excited with some of the outcome of the panning shots. It showed the car was moving pretty fast and I was even more surprised when I got 2 bonus shots.

What is so great about this shot? Well the background has motion blur which shows the car is moving pretty fast, the front wheels are turning as well so means the car is moving and not stationary and the kicker is the back wheels are in full lock means they pulled the hand brake as soon as my shutter clicked. I would call this the money shot of the day.

With the first stage of the drifting over, I decided to take some pictures of people instead...

There weren't many hot chicks but this was the best I could do. During the mid time interval, the main sponsor had something in store for people at the event.

Oh yea it it is huge hot air balloon in the shape of a sim card. How awesome is that? If you bought a prepaid sim or top up your pre paid sim with RM30 value, you get a ride for one person. If you top-up RM50 and you get a ride for 2 people. 

We used our media pass to gain access to the pits and it was amazing. 

Most of these guys are packing some serious hardware. Most of them were running turbos and it was such a short track

Some were also running twin turbos on their cars

The most impressive thing is were some of them were also running NOS. I wouldn't expect people to run NOS but there they were...

Before the second round started, we decided to change vantage point to see if we could get a different view point. Oh boy we got it and this time we were even closer to the action. Just before they started with the second round, all the drivers did a parade lap.

This was followed by some burning rubber and donut drawing courtesy of the youngest driver of the field and title sponsor Achilles tyres

The the drift action started and I caught  some close drifting action....

Unfortunately the 3 of us had to leave before the event ended as we had a badminton game to attend. However we left happy and pumped full of adrenaline. We have to thank Jack and The Car Guys for giving us the media pass and allowing us to get so close we could hear the tyre screeching, smell burnt rubber and even hear the NOS being activated. It was AWESOME!!!!