This is a recap of Formula Drift Wall Speedway that came from the KÖNIG Drift Driver Dennis Mertzanis.
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Wall, NJ – Formula Drift Round 4 at Wall speedway in beautiful New Jersey. Well, what an event. I had a good time despite the challenges. Thursday practice was crazy. For the first time with this car, I was full throttle around the entire track. Freaking sweet, but the side effect was the car caught on fire. How you ask? Well, during the build we neglected to add more than enough heat shielding material around everything. “It should be fine” is a dangerous comment. I set the cover for my fans on fire from all the heat being produced during WOT…..wow; it was awesome flogging on the car that hard.
I noticed the rear camber was too much, so we made a change. The mistake I made was I didn’t record the toe before I changed the camber…so I couldn’t set it back to what it was. So we guessed. Car got crappy and I struggled to qualify high. We did make it, but anyone that put a score down made. I’m not feeling so accomplished. The only thing I can say is that there were not many points separating me from the 18th place guy, if I remember correctly. I was slated to go against Tyler McQuirre…AGAIN.
During Top32 something weird happened. I saw ASD pull Tyler’s car to the pits during practice and I wondered what was up. I line up for tandem and he is a no show. The FD staff tells me he called a 5 min time out. At the time I was kinda hoping for a buy. Lets face it, car for car and driver for driver, I’m at a disadvantage and I could have used some luck. I always joke that there’s no easy time for me, I have to earn it. I would rather win man to man, but in this case, I wanted to move to top 16 and battle Joon or Odi.
After nearly 6 min, they announce he is ready to go with “10 seconds to spare” they said. Of course, having a stop watch handy would have been an awesome idea so we could have tracked the minutes to know he was well over 5 minutes. If I had, I could have protested. This is not a mistake I will make again…well, I probably will. I only found out after the event when people were coming up to me and saying something about 7 min, 6.5 min and so on.
What a bummer! You can’t go back in time. I could have had a top 8 finish if only I had a stop watch handy! At FD, a large part of your success is who you are paired up against and this was a good bracket for me had I beat Tyler. Well, the long and short of it is Tyler beats me because I drove crappy and I didn’t have a stop watch.
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Image and content courtesy of Wrecked Mag
