Samuel Hubinette
Stina and I went down to Sarasota, Fla. the weekend before the Atlanta event, where our friends David and Jody Leach own a condo. They’re great friends and we had fun playing with all their toys. We went down there and went kayaking and went out on wave runners in the bay. We did a lot of exercising and different activities, from learning how to better throw an American football to drifting around in the water in a wave runner. Also, it helped us Californians to get acclimated to the East Coast time.
We got a cheap rental car and took a little road trip to Road Atlanta, in time to do some testing. We stayed with some friends up in Atlanta that had a beautiful home. They’re also my business partners in a company I co-own called Superior Impacto, which focuses on marketing for radio stations mostly in South America. So we hung with them and had a good time.
Early Friday morning we had an opportunity to be live on FOX news, which was great. It’s always kind of thrilling to be part of a live feed because if you make a mistake it’s going to show on TV right away. We got to take the journalist for a ride along in my Mopar Dodge Viper SRT10 and she loved it. We got some good P.R. out of that. Then we qualified well on Friday, in the fifth spot. It was a really tight battle with just a few points separating the No. 1 qualifier and the No. 6 qualifier, really small margins.
It was great to see so many people coming out to the track on Friday. When the gates opened people just started pouring in. It was great to see the energy of the fans, how excited they were, basically running to the pits to talk to the drivers. I think it was the largest crowd for a Formula Drift event at Road Atlanta in the six years since the series has been going there. It felt really good to get that backing from the fans down there in the south. I think Chrysler LLC dealer Mike Hayes has done a great job in helping promote drifting and the tuner scene down there, as well as being one of the top Mopar salesman in the world. He’s always a positive presence when we make the Road Atlanta stop, and it was good to see him.
On race day we beat Jeff Jones in the Top 32 then met Chris Forsberg next. We ended up having to go up against him in two One More Time battles. We felt very confident after the first One More Time that we had him, but we were wrong. We had to go again, and we were really on each other. When it was his turn to lead, we were on him in the first corner, and he was going slower than he had done in the past, and I tapped him a little bit with my right front tire, causing us to spin.
It became my bad, and we got knocked out. It’s a tough situation, because if you’re too far away you’re not going to get the points and if you’re too close that can cost you too. We got kicked out in the Top 16, and that’s something that we are not used to. We’re accustomed to getting to the later rounds. What can you do, you have to move on. We’re fourth in points, not far out of first, and we’re saddling up for our next event in New Jersey. See all you Mopar fans out there!