Formula Drift 2014 Round 1: Long Beach

April 30, 2014 Joseph Dale 908 Views

We’ve been super busy over here so we haven’t been able to make this long over due post of how round 1 of Formula drift went down, but here it is! As you know this is round 1 of the 2014 Formula Drift championship, plenty of new faces have showed up this year including the usual regulars. Some of the biggest topics during the off season was the crazy stacked new rookie class for 2014 and the horsepower wars where everyone is pushing for the four digit club. Anyways here is our quick run down on what we thought was important for everyone to know..

Words by: Jason Scott

Pics by: Jason Scott, John Markley, and Brandon Burke

Some of the more notable news over the off season was that Kenny Moen would be running a new 2JZ powered S14 under the bridges racing name. Moen is running the wisefab angle kit and Feal 441 coilovers for all the ground work, and that coupled with the 700hp 2jz he will definitely be a contender for the championship if all goes well or a top 5 finisher..

Dave Briggs came back with a new Livery after going over the car over during the offseason, he went on to replace most of the suspension in favor for the parts by max catalog which included everything from their drop knuckles all the way to their coilovers. Motor wise its a similar setup as last year and its the last running SR20 in Formula Drift, which is kinda sad in my opinion..

Brandon Wicknick is the undisputed king of breaking anything and everything when it comes to his travel rigs, but luckily his S13 doesn’t have that many problems. For 2014 Wicknick gained a new title sponsor Driftmotion which replaced godspeed which was last years title sponsor..

2013 Rookie of the year Mats Baribeau came back with a freshly rebuild JZX90 with the new Figs engineering front angle kit and a newly build 3.4 stroker JZ with GTX4088R and these were definitely nice additions to his car. Some of the runs he was putting done were just down right awesome to watch while many others struggled..

Dean Kearney has slowly been developing his viper and its starting to show with the massive amounts of speed this thing has gained in the past year. Even after he backed the rear end into a wall during media day he still recored the fastest speed in the speed zone showing the cars future potential..

Another big announcement just before the season started was the fact that Corey Hosford would not be running the 2014 Formula drift season. Corey would be taking a different route this year by traveling and doing drift demo’s around the country and just having lots of fun..

It definitely looks like fun is being had..

Ken Gushi was one of the heavy hitters that got a new car car for the 2014 season, after a hard 2013 season where they saw some sort of motor failure at most of the rounds they decided to build a new FRS but with a more tried and true motor the 2jz. Overall I think its one of the best looking FD cars to hit the grid this year and its definitely looking like a lot nicer of a car to drive..

Danny George’s spotter from 2013 Dan Brockett gained his Formula Drift license last year and built up a pretty awesome looking coupe powered by a RB28 and GTX35R. Many of you will know him from the youtube video’s “Motorcycle vs Car drift battle”, If you haven’t seen those yet go check them out on youtube!

Tyler Wolfson is another new rookies for 2014 and he is driving his crazy big turbo RX7 FD. Tyler is one of the Team GT Radial drivers partnered with Kyle Mohan. His FD is rocking a 13b with stock ports and a GT42 and a huge shot of nitrous to power this beast, there are no real confirmed numbers since it started to spin on the dyno at 4500rpm with around 570hp so its definitely a healthy little rotary..

Qualifying was pretty straight forward this round with Formula Drift reverting back to their traditional style of qualifying where everyone runs two times instead of the knockout style. There were a couple hiccups through out qualifying but overall went smoothly minus a couple incidents with the walls for some people…

Here is the break down of the Top 10 spots in Qualifying..

One of the biggest upsets in the event in my opinion was the Daigo vs Gooden battle, Daigo ran into some mechanical problems after he made some contact earlier in the run but he wasn’t able to make it back for a second run..

I think we missed the possibility of a very good battle similar to the Daigo Vs Aasbo battle last year..

Pat Gooden did go on to the Top 16 and faced Chris Forsberg but he didn’t do enough to beat chris, but this new car is definitely looking great for Pat, I can’t wait to see what he can do later on when we get to the bigger entry tracks like Atlanta..

This battle between Tuerck and Pawlak was pretty straight forward with Justin just edging out Tuerck to move on, there was some controversy on the internet about this battle due to Justin entering in with a feint rather than a brake entry like everyone else, but at the end of the day its all about style points now and JTP is going in the right direction..

Forrest Wang was all over Dennis Mertzanis in this battle, even with the 1000hp LS7 Dennis couldn’t pull away from the hard charging Forrest, This year Forrest is definitely going to make a huge leap toward the top of the points standing compared to last year..

In this battle DMAC would get the better of Vaughn Gitten in Long beach because Vaugh made a huge error on his follow run on the transition under the bridge, this allowed DMAC to continue on to the great 8 and finally get knocked out by forsberg..

After a long afternoon of drifting it came down to the final two which were Chris Forsberg and Kenny Moen. The battle was pretty straight forward with only one driver making a small mistake..