Well…Well…Well. It looks like I’m going to be posting on the Wrecked blog throughout the 2010 season. I feel like a lot of blogs and sites have the same info after events. I hope to post  stuff that happens behind the camera’s and the event from my eye’s

Many of you know my background and how I got into drifting, but for those of you who don’t… I actually started racing karts when I was 14. I moved into cars a few years later and have since raced pretty much every type of racing from Formula Vauxhall in Europe, ALMS, to even Stockcars. The question that I’m asked the most lately is how the hell did I get introduced to drifting? It’s a period in my life that I will never forget!

It goes all the way back to 1997, where I was racing in the Jim Russell Race Series and I met this skinny Jim Russell mechanic from Hawaii. He showed me a home video from what he called “His Mountain” but they were actually in a parking lot. I remember thinking “what the hell are these guys doing?” It looked like a bunch of guys just having fun and screwing off in a parking lot. But he insisted that it was a competition.  That skinny mechanic from Hawaii was Alex Pfeiffer.

About a year after I saw that crazy video, I left for Europe where I raced Formula Vauxhall for couple of years, which was an experience like no other! I returned to the states and in 2001 and raced a Porsche RSR with the Racer’s Group in the American Le Mans series and one of the mechanics on the team was Alex Pfeiffer and he was still drifting. Our career paths were so different but seemed to cross each other. Over the next few years, I spent time in a USAC Western Series Sprint car and a NASCAR Southwest Tour car, but during this time I kept seeing more drifting popping up. It defiantly started to spark my interest!

It was in 2003 when I got to drive a true drift car for the first time. I was working on a “Ride N Drive” programs in Irvine CA and one of the Yokohama drift teams needed to test their car, so they came out to the event to use the course we set up. That Team was JIC and that is also the first time I meet Jon K, owner of JIC. They brought out 2 cars, Brian Norris’s JIC  S-13 and the JIC 350z. Jon K saw me giving rides in a stock mustang and I was pretty much drifting the entire course, so he asked me if I wanted to try their 350z. I jumped at the opportunity and I think I surprised a few people with how comfortable I was drifting the car. It was a release to me, or even like medication!

It wasn’t long after that event that I got a call from Yokohama asking if I wanted to drive the Jasper Performance Supra in Formula D. It didn’t take long for me to say YES! The deal with Jasper happened pretty late, so we were forced to miss the very first round of Formula D in 2004. My first event would be the 2nd round of the 2004 Formula D championship in Houston TX. My first drift event ever and I qualified 4th and finished 4th! Honestly, I had no idea what was going on. This was the first drift event that I had ever witnessed; I was simply just driving the crap out of the car!

I continued to race and at the time I was mainly running in the NASCAR Southwest Tour but I think Drifting entered my career at the perfect time. I was looking for something different and new, and drifting was that. Taking a car and manipulating it like you do in drifting, is an amazing feeling But the people involved in the sport were a breath of fresh air. Racing can be pretty cut throat on so many levels, and I was getting sick of the political BS that came with it. Drifting has a feel like no other motersports and it’s because of the people involved, from the fans to the teams.

I spent two years driving the Jasper Supra and then got an opportunity in 2006 to drive the RSR S2000, which ended up being “sloppy seconds” from Alex Pfeiffer’s time in that car haha. Had an OK season with them and finished 3rd in Chicago but RSR decided to take a year off from drifting so I made the move to the team were it all started, JIC. While at JIC, we worked on a drift program that most people thought was impossible. We brought out a Porsche GT2 to Formula D and D1. We proved a lot of people wrong around the world by qualifying 2nd at D1 Irwindale and finishing 2nd at the Englishtown Formula D event. But in the end, the car broke a lot and the team fell apart due to money, and that is when I got my most competitive ride in Formula D with Team Falken. In 2009 I drove the Falken Tire Nissan 350Z to a 3rd place finish in the Formula D Championship and gave Team Falken their best season finish in the team’s history!

2010 is going to be CRAZY! I can’t wait to get back in the car and just give it hell! I hope to give you guys some cool crap to read this year and some video clips that you normally don’t get to see. Thanks to Wrecked for asking me to blog on here this year.

Tyler

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