Samuel Hubinette
What an exciting week! We started out on Tuesday with the media day for the Long Beach Grand Prix event. We were together with all the celebrity drivers and were out showcasing the sport of drifting, along with the Mopar® NuFormz team. We got on the live show with KTLA here in Los Angeles, and we got to really push the sport of drifting and highlight our sponsors. That was a great way to start the week.
Then we had a pre-launch of my new DVD, “Drift Ya Later,” for friends and a few media people at the Oakley world headquarters in Lake Forest, Calif. We screened the DVD we shot last winter above the Arctic Circle in Sweden and also at the 2008 Formula Drift event in Las Vegas. The response was really positive and it was a great evening.
Then we moved on to the Formula Drift season-opening party at Smooth’s Sports Grille on Thursday. There was a parade of drift cars, including my Mopar Dodge Viper SRT10®, from the Long Beach street course to a display on Pine Avenue. The street was closed down and all the drivers signed autographs for fans as they checked out the cars. It was also nice to talk with all the drivers that I hadn’t seen for a while during the off-season.
Friday was qualification day. We were working hard to get the car as quick and nimble as possible, and also to get myself into drift mode. I was anxious to get out there, but we had a tough day. A fan wasn’t working so the car was overheating, and it was a struggling day. We qualified 12th, which I think is the worst qualifying run we have ever had in our Viper. But we sat down, talked it out and fixed the problem and changed the set up on the car, and we came out on Saturday on fire. We were on our game on D-Day.
There were a lot of crazy things going on all day during eliminations. I had Vaughn Gittin Jr. come from behind and hit me, almost taking me out of the event, which was frustrating. NuFormz fixed the damage to the right rear wheel and slightly adjusted the toe out a little for me, but not much. I had to get back out in a car that was a little bit off. But on the next run, I took him out, which was great! Then in the semis I knocked out Robbie Nishida.
There was a lot of “One More Time” tandem runs throughout the day, where the judges decided the drivers needed to take additional runs before they could decide the winner. Even when a driver spun out, the judges called for a “One More Time.” But in my finals match against Ryan Tuerck, we had two very close runs, yet the judges gave the win to Tuerck without calling a “One More Time.” We were very surprised, disappointed and confused at the decision, but that’s what it is and we are going to move on.
We battled all the way to a second-place finish, so overall it was a great start to the new season. We got a good chunk of points and we're hungry now to move on to Atlanta, and then we’ll bring out the Mopar Drift Dodge Challenger at New Jersey. I can't wait to get into the seat of that car and get it ready to rock the house with Mopar power.