Samuel Hubinette
After the Round Six Formula Drift event at Sonoma, my wife Stina and I headed back home to Newport Coast, Calif. During the downtime between races I kept busy with a few personal projects. One of the things I’ve been working on lately is developing my own performance driving school. It’s called the 360 Performance Driving Academy. I spent a lot of time on that, with me and my partner meeting with a lot of different people.
Another thing I’m excited about is driving in the Baja 1000 in November! I had a meeting with the folks from BFGoodrich, and I’m going to run the race for them this year. I’m very honored to be a part of their efforts at the event. I’ve also been working with a new shoe sponsor that is going to create a custom-built shoe for me, and they are also going to make a Baja racing shoe for me. The company is Auri, a local shoe brand that is pushing hard to make a signature Samuel Hübinette shoe, so that is really exciting.
I attended the Ante Up for Autism charity event on Oct. 3, hosted by celebs Lance Armstrong and Jenny McCarthy, with extreme sports stars like Tony Hawk in attendance. I brought some Mopar flavor to the event, offering up for auction a ride-along in my Mopar Dodge Viper SRT10 at the Red Bull World Championships, scheduled for the middle of November in Long Beach, Calif. Of course, the chance to experience Mopar power attracted a lot of bidders. And it was all for a good cause, so that was awesome!
We’ve been having amazing weather lately in Southern California. It’s been in the 80s and 90s. Stina and I went to the Crystal Cove beach in Newport Coast with her parents, who were still in town from Sweden, and it was amazing. It was so beautiful, and it was off-season so there was hardly anyone down there. I’ve been doing a lot of mountain biking also, ripping around the trails near my place. I’ve been taking boxing classes with Stina as well, to improve our cardio.
Then it was time to get busy, as we began to prepare for the final event at Irwindale Speedway on Oct. 11 in Southern California and get everything squared away for that. It’s a lot of stuff to take care of. Not just getting the car ready, but arranging passes for friends and family and getting that kind of stuff set up.
The media day/practice was on Oct. 9, and I gave ride-alongs to a bunch of press people, and also a captain from the LAPD. I’m a special reserve officer now! So I was excited to have him out. It’s always good to have a captain from the LAPD in your corner. Later that night on Thursday, some of the top drivers dressed up in fat suits and competed in sumo battles during filming for SPEED TV. So funny! I beat Dai Yoshihara but tweaked my neck a bit, so I couldn’t go on. I had to retire from my sumo career!
We tested the car on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday of race week at Irwindale. Lots of great passes in the Mopar-powered Viper, and we were feeling great. Then we ran into trouble late on Friday. We were having excellent runs, with the Mopar Dodge Viper SRT10 running superbly. We came out for the last test session, and I came in too hot following the lead car on a run. I lost my line and smacked into the wall—hard! I hit a gap in the wall that caught my rear wheel and caused the front end of the car to smack the wall, too. The NuFormz team had to work the whole night to fix it and get it ready, which they did! What a great job!
The event day on Saturday, we advanced to the Great Eight round, but that’s as far as I made it. That was the end of the season for Formula Drift. I finished runner-up in the standings—still a great finish, but you’re always pointing towards a championship.
We’re looking forward now to the upcoming exhibition, the Red Bull World Championships, where we will look to grab the world championship crown. In the meantime, we have a big reveal coming up for the SEMA show that will be a huge hit. So the Mopar NuFormz team has a lot to look forward to in the coming months!