This is the second in a three-part series about the fabulous misadventures of Blooper the Drift Car attending the Rainbow Road Trackcross event at Summit Point! If you haven’t already, check out part one here.
The Fargo Crew made it across the country from Fargo, ND to the Rainbow Road Autocross event at Summit Point Motorsports Park in West Virginia. We’d roasted with no AC in traffic, wound through mountains, and skidded through toll booths to get here. Blooper, the rowdy Nissan 350Z, slept overnight in a fellow Out Motorsports member’s yard while we partied on Friday night. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, I had to get him to the track for registration and tech. This is where the problems started.
Even with new rubber on all four corners, Blooper is known for having issues in wet grass because he’s so low and has zero traction assistance. It took several tries to get him out of the damp yard, and any attempt to keep the muffler-less VQ engine quiet failed miserably, as he burbled onto the main road towards the track. My apologies to anyone in that neighborhood who expected to sleep in that morning.
The tech inspection was easy, and everyone was very friendly and excited to be there despite the early start. Breann and Matt rolled up as support with drinks and sunscreen to keep everyone from melting in the heat, and work assignments were handed out. I was surprised at the variety of vehicles: vintage cars, crossovers, a minivan, sports cars, and even a DeLorean! Blooper still managed to look a little out of place, but he wore his orange and pink pride colors happily. When it came time to run the course, I decided I’d take it easy and see how bad the tight turns really were. He might be a drift car, but a 350Z is still sporty!
Nope. No. Naw. Ain’t gonna happen.
Not only is a “normal” racing line the complete opposite of a drifting line, but keeping Blooper from stepping out made the run painfully slow. The cringey sound of drift car understeer lurching around while trying to dodge the little grass infields and curbs was embarrassing. I wasn’t here to be super competitive, so I shifted tactics and started going for style instead. A little drift here, a little slide there. Not too much mayhem, but just enough that people started to watch when I staged at the starting line. Phones would come out at the ready when Blooper launched forward.
At one point I stayed on the throttle to get out of an ill-timed spin, which meant Blooper backed into a burnout and dropped a massive plume of white smoke on the course. My new friend Ian looked very cinematic while driving his little Corolla through the rising mushroom cloud immediately behind us, but everyone knew who did it. When the morning sessions ended, Blooper was at the bottom for timing but top interest for spectators. During the lunch break, several people called dibs on a ride-along in the lesbian drift car.
The best part of drifting is having a ride-along, and nearly every run had someone sliding into the passenger seat with me to go flying sideways. At a local drift event at home, I’m a step above the novices. At this autocross event, Blooper and I were the biggest showcase. People who had never seen a drift car were excited for a chance to ride with me. No one cared about our lap times. My parents had even come to the event to check out my driving, and they were floored at what I could do in this ragamuffin Nissan with mutilated bumpers and bright wheels. At every party we’re the party, shaking our asses around the skid pad!
The afternoon course layout was changed to be counterclockwise, which is my preferred direction to slide, and to my complete and utter delight it included a very long, sweeping turn in the middle that had a gap of cones to force everyone to take the same line through it. It looked just big enough to slam Blooper through it sideways. I needed to thread that needle and show off in the best way possible.
My new buddy Dom hopped in for the first run, snapped a cheeky selfie, and off we went. This was his first time in a drift car, so we had to show him a good time. I swung Blooper to set up the first turn, snapped a few transitions, then threw full tilt into the sweeper towards the cone gate. I could hear Dom’s giddy shrieking over the tires roasting as I looked past him through the passenger window and watched the cone gate flicker past.
We were perfectly centered through it. All he could manage was a breathless “F*ck” as we crossed the finish line a few turns later. Several others who rode along had similar reactions as I put Blooper through that gap over and over, leaving a huge tail of smoke from one side of the course to the other.
Later that night at the hotel lobby party, several drivers came up to chat about how cool the drifting looked and how much fun they had watching from the lineup. Having a bunch of excited car nerds together for a fully welcoming event was amazing. It doesn’t matter who you are, what your orientation is, or what car you drive. People in Out Motorsports adore hyping each other up about their rides, even if you’re the lunatic with the drift car that crashed the autocross event. However, the real crash didn’t happen until the following day when we moved to the Jefferson Circuit instead of the skid pad, where Blooper escalated to violence.
Stay tuned for the final chapter!