photographer: Henry Z. DeKuyper
Once every Blue Moon, our parent company, Primedia, puts together an event for its import enthusiast magazines to get involved in and write a story about. Regardless of our complaints or excuses, we have little choice in the matter. Every fifth Blue Moon however, the event actually exceeds our expectations and turns into an interesting story. This is one of them.
Primedia put on the Motor Skills Challenge in conjunction with Toyo tires to give readers an opportunity to come out to the track and try their hand at some real seat time. The idea was simple; pick five of our readers and invite them to bring their cars out to the track. The twist was that the owners tested their skills against a professional driver-behind the wheel of their own cars. No one knows a car better than its owner, right? This might be the case if it was a contest for finding change or two-year-old Twinkies hidden in the interior, but not for doing hot laps on a road course. While we're always looking for an excuse to get on the track, sending out five amateurs to have their asses immediately handed to them by a professional shoe is pretty lame. It's like winning a drag race against a Lancer with an EVO, what's the point?
So instead of picking five random readers like we were supposed to, we gathered up five avid readers from our industry, ranging from tuners to full race drivers, who were used to trading paint. We picked each driver based on their backgrounds, driving experience and the platform they drive, which ranged from daily-drivers to fully-caged drift cars.
The day started with five cars and six drivers; Drift Association's Wes Hamachi in his Toyota Corolla GT-S, Mike Kojima in his Nissan Sentra race car, JIC USA's Jon K and his Nissan Silvia S15 drift car, Tavis Tan's street EVO VIII and Russ Warr's full-interior NASA-prepped WRX STi. Just about every major drive configuration except a mid-engine was included in the roundup to test our professional driver's abilities and versatility. James Hickerson from Eibach Springs was the pro to beat. Although not a big name race driver, Hickerson's experience spans everything from test driving and suspension development for Eibach Springs to racing in the Silver State Classic. Each car would be driven back to back by the owner and then Hickerson, competing for the fastest time.
The showdown happened on the California Speedway infield road course, which has 17 sharp turns within a short distance of 1.5 miles and is about as flat as an eight-year-old boy's chest. But the lack of elevation change is offset by FIA curbs at every corner for endless chassis tossing fun. It's a giant go cart track for full-sized cars.
The morning started with a shakedown session for each of our drivers, who with the exception of just one, were all new to the infield's countless 90-degree corners. Within the thirty minutes of warm up, we already had our first casualty. Hamachi's 22 year old AE86 econo-box transmission finally took a crap. Recognizable chunks of gear teeth came out with the oil when his crew did a 30 minute tranny-swap underneath their rusting trailer. Leave it to a drifter to be prepared with a spare tranny on hand.
Our challenger group all ran the Infield in less than a minute twenty-five seconds for their best lap times-several seconds faster than every other magazine's run groups. Russ Warr took the fastest lap in the group with a blistering 1:14.76 lap in his street STi.