With seven minutes remaining until the new day, Mike's father, Miyo, a short and solitary man with gray hair, hands as tough and tarred as asphalt, and the finest Filipino heritage, lit yet another Marlboro, and the cigarette smoke drifted up his face like a fugitive snake, vanishing into the desert night that seemed to stretch cold and lightless across all of eternity.
And the other men from Las Vegas—seven in total: four young mechanics whose hands, too, were crusted hard and black, and three drivers, including Mike, whose customized cars sat idle under Miyo's enigmatic stare—crammed into a couple rooms without heaters at the Joshua Motel in Rosamond, California. They had just arrived after a 225-mile journey from Southern Nevada, and in 24 hours they would leave that barren little town to return home.
During their previous escapades to Rosamond, their habit had been to camp out in front of the Willow Springs International Raceway, sleeping away the few hours before the gates opened in their cars. But tonight they pooled their money and booked the town's last two available motel rooms, for outside, where Miyo smoked his Marlboros without pause and stared at the cars as if they were insolvable women, it was cold enough to make a man's balls retract into his body, and the Vegasdrift team would need all the testosterone it could muster for tomorrow, when the cars would be put on the line for neither money nor profit, but the mere thrill of driving without traction.
Conceived and cultivated in the backcountry of Japan, drifting—the lurid motor sport in which cars slide through bends and corners at full throttle—arrived in America at the turn of the 21st century and into Mike Bolano's bloodstream soon thereafter. He had come from the Philippines a congenital car enthusiast, and as soon as he experienced his first drift—as soon as that massive influx of the sport's definitive elements entered his system, the speed and the sound and the smoke, and the smell of burnt tires—he was hooked. And his craving for it only heightened over the dozens of drifting events that followed; so much so, in fact, that on the morning of February 26 he was up and ready for the West Coast's first amateur competition of 2006 before the sun even arose.
His teammate and best friend, Tommy Suell, was still sleeping. It had taken him several hours to overcome the cold winter night and find rest, the kind of rest where he might slip into another one of his reoccurring dreams about Japan, the country where he had been born to a black father and Thai mother, where he, like so many other restive and unpretentious youths in search for mediums of artistic expression, drifted toward cars—loud and bright and supercharged cars—and where he gave himself to the new hobby of driving sideways for the same reason everyone else in his country did: to have fun. The dream transports him to Rosamond, California, and into the dark cockpit of his 1986 Toyota Corolla, with its solitary racing seat, its steel safety bar, its multiple gauges and meters and countless buttons and switches, just like a NASA shuttle, and its canister of nitrous oxide riding shotgun, where the passenger seat used to be before its was stripped along with the car's rear seats. In his dream Tommy pulls up to the starting line, and that's exactly when his dreaming becomes more like an envisioning of the event to come.
"GO!" the starter says, and out from behind the starting line he dashes unto the first straightaway, looking like a lion in pursuit of its prey, sounding like a hive of bothered bees, accruing as much speed as his supercharged Corolla can manage in a sixteenth of a mile, his foot pressed hard on the gas pedal, almost as if he were trying to push it through the floorboard; and then he comes to the course's first corner and upon entering it he kicks in his clutch, or pulls hard on his emergency brake, or employs any one of the many other techniques that force his back tires to lose grip on the pavement and thus drift out and forward, bringing the car near a 90-degree plane, during the moment of which he counter-steers with great exaggeration (and with his foot still trying to push the gas pedal through the floor!) in an effort to regain control of the sliding car, whose back tires are wailing away like demons in torment and releasing clouds of smoke because vehicles weren't meant to be driven around corners at full throttle, and in the eternal moments to follow he maneuvers his car around the bend along the most efficient path possible—the racing line—which begins out wide, teasing the edge of the track, then clips the innermost corner of the turn, called the apex, and then glides outside once again to resume a maximum speed down the next straightaway. It's the perfect drift. And he does it again and again, along the course's every turn, so that it appears he is sliding across the entire track, leaving in his wake a trail of evanescent smoke and the smell of burnt rubber.
"Come on, let's go!" Mike said, trying to resurrect the rest of the Vegasdrift team from their cryogenic sleep. "It's Sunday!"
The gates are already open, Mike said, and if we get there early enough, we can sneak in a few extra practice runs. Which is exactly what they needed, because in Las Vegas, where the drift culture has yet to prosper, the opportunities to get track time are all but inexistent. And so the city's few serious drifters, like Mike Bolanos and Tommy Suell, who at the age of 26 already has a decade of experience in the infantile sport, far more than most Americans, and their teammate Kevin Leung, must not only travel to Southern California at their own expense to get repetitions behind the wheel, but must also get out of bed by 6: 15 a.m. to slip in a few extra runs.
Miyo, the team's chief mechanic and a born rally racer, had already been outside, preparing all the cars for departure, fending off the icy morning winds with his inexhaustible cigarettes.
The team then left for Willow Springs, a racing compound covering 600 acres of Mojave desert just 50 miles north of Los Angeles, with their caravan wholly intact: both Mike's sunflower 1986 Toyota Corolla and its twin, Tommy's sunflower Corolla, chained to SUV's, looking like Highlighter streaks across the open road; Kevin's white Toyota MR2, quick and compact, and a little beat up, just like a small college running back; and a pickup full of reinforcements, spare tires and various automobile tools and parts, all of which would be exhausted by the end of the long day.
The caravan headed five miles down Rosamond's central highway, to the WSIR Speedway Track, an oval course one quarter-mile in length and embanked by sand slopes that have saved countless errant cars from spinning out unto oblivion. Already parked in the pit were several of the sport's most common cars, Toyotas and Nissans and Mazdas, whose light bodies, rear-wheel drive and low resistance to constant modifications make them apt candidates for drifting, a sport in which the driver seeks to lose traction in his back tires and constantly dilapidates his car. And while the pastel reds and tangerines of sunrise began to drift away into the Southern California mountains, more and more drivers, mechanics, and fans filtered in. It was an amalgam of people, Asian for the most part but white and black also, who in each other found fellowship and endless conversation in the one passion that bonded all their zany personalities together: cars. People everywhere, lighting new cigarettes with the butts of dying ones, talked of the cars you need to drive to go on living life without regrets and those that should have never been made in the first place. Exotic little girls floated between cars and made them look twice as attractive. And an esprit de corps, mixed in with the frigid air, soon hovered palpable and infectious over the entire speedway, and once you caught a drift of it your heart begins to accelerate.
"As soon as I enter the gates," Tommy says, "I can feel that excitement and rush. It's like nothing else."
The event was being put on by Charlie Ongsingco, a drifting pioneer in America, and his grassroots organization, JustDrift. It was designed to give amateur drifters an opportunity to improve themselves, to compete with each other in an apolitical arena, and to just have fun drifting their cars. The club has been putting on two events a month and quarterly competitions at the WSIR, but this year the plan is to have six competitions, with today's battle being the first. Over 50 competitors from four states appeared, many of them are well on their way to becoming professional drifters.
The popularity of the sport is skyrocketing, as witnessed in the professional Formula D and D1 series, which shatter attendance records at every raceway at which they perform. Drifting has already seeped into mainstream video games, and soon Hollywood, too, when The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift opens later this year. And because it creates a more exciting atmosphere than drag racing, NASCAR or anything else on this side of Hades, Mike says, young kids are picking it up fast, especially in Southern California, where the automobile-import scene is thriving, and Hawaii, where many of the Japanese who started the craze have migrated.
"When I started, it took two or three very frustrating events to learn how to drift," Mike, 24, says. "But today, kids get good after just one event. Because there's so many ways to learn now—there are so many DVDs and it's all over the Internet—and so many new technologies to make you better."
Plus, tracks to practice on are becoming more accessible as the sport gains popularity, allowing many drifters to master the geometrics of the sport through repetition. "Because they can practice all the time," says Ongsingco, "California drivers are best right now. And they also have the most diverse skills, because they can practice on so many different courses." But for members of Vegasdrift—some 30 novices and a handful of veterans like the three at Rosamond this weekend—repetitions are hard to come by without an affordable track nearby, or enough commitment from either drivers or sponsors to initiate their own events. And even today, after the event got off to a late start, they couldn't get the extra practice runs they had awakened early for.
After a preamble from Charlie, the trial runs began at noon with the first car, adorned with decals, flying counterclockwise around the oval track split in half vertically by a straightaway, practicing its drifts around the course's four turns and filling the air with white haze and great cacophony. The trial runs—six per car—gave drivers the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the track, to gauge the conditions, which today are ideal on account of the cool weather, and above all, to get intimate with their cars. For the crux of drifting is to have complete and utter control over both your environment and your vehicle at every given moment of your run.
After mediocre primary runs, during which Tommy and Mike and Kevin tried to shake off their rust and reintroduce themselves to their respective Toyotas, which they do not drive outside of the speedways, each made critical adjustments to their cars. In essence, drifting is a sport of perpetual adjustments. Mike has put some $12,000 into the Corolla he bought for $900 six years ago. With his father's help, he has, among many other things, changed the springs, put in stiffer shock absorbers, installed an indispensable LSD (limited slip differential, which turns both wheels on the back axis at the same time), replaced the original motor with one from a '92 Corolla, put in a racing seat, and clothed it all in a body kit with a yellow paint job. Drifting is an expensive sport, and broken parts are an inevitable reality. Tommy, who's owned at least 15 cars since his youth in Japan, has put more than $15,000 into the Corolla he bought for a grand in 2004, and that's with the luxury of Miyo or he himself performing the labor at no cost.
Tommy says that drifting didn't become too costly until after it had arrived in the United States, in large part because with that move the Japanese underground hobby evolved into a regulated American sport. In just the past 24 hours, for instance, Tommy, a pilot in training for Allegiant Air during the week, had paid out of his own wallet the costs of hauling his Corolla from Las Vegas to Rosamond, his share of the cold motel rooms, a $10 track-entrance fee at Willow Springs and $135 to register for the drifting event, with no chance of reclaiming a single penny for his merits on the course.
"But," Tommy says, "you feel like it's all worth it while you're on that track."
Conceived and cultivated in the back of Miyo's auto shop, the Vegasdrift team—comprised by and large of converts from various other motor sports, such as autocross—had come into form 18 months ago, when Tommy Suell sought out the owner of his 1986 Toyota Corolla's sister, Mike Bolanos, and since then the two have become inseparable, not just as friends but also as traveling buddies to various drifting events in California, Arizona and even the East Coast. In fact, about the only time the two are separated is when one of them is in that lonely world just before he is to drift.
Which is where Mike stood with the surging 2 o'clock wind to his back on Sunday, waiting for his turn in the first competition round. He stood in the pit and watched his peers fill the track with waves of smoke, though he says he shouldn't have, for he had enough sources of pressure eating away at his gut without having to see how good his competitors were. But he stood there anyway, and took it all in.
Indeed: He took in that track full of haze, full of screeching, full of hot tar and burnt rubber, and full of motors that sounded like a neighborhood of synchronized lawn mowers; and like everyone else he took in that turbulent scene full of torque, full of spinouts, full of centripetal force, full of lost bumpers and atomic dust clouds and full of enjoyment too; full of fears, full of inhibitions, full of 180-degree screaming stops and full of momentum carrying cars around 100 yards of bend, and full of ins and outs and starts and stops and frustrations and disappointments, and above all full of incessant heart-racing action.
Then it was his turn.
He ran well, Mike did, leaving his father and his team proud, but he was not one of the 16 chosen to advance to the next round.
"With drifting, it's all about being in the zone," Mike said after his run, his shoulders slumped. "I wasn't in the zone. Plus, there were a lot of really good drivers out there."
Unlike other motor sports, drifting is not a race. It's a pageant. Similar to figure skating, judges determine a winner, and their criteria are simple: How close to a 90-degree angle was the drifting? How fast was the drifting? How committed to the racing line was the drifting?
Every driver begins with a perfect score—100 points—and it is the driver's goal to make minimal mistakes and retain as high a score as possible.
One driver at Willow Springs on Sunday put it this way:
"Executing a great run is like floating the whole way. And afterward you feel the most incredible natural high. But no one—no one—has ever had a perfect run, or else they would have flown off to heaven right then and there."
Tommy had better fortune than his two teammates, making the cut into the second round. And so he was one of the 16 to ignite his engine once again, while the descending California sun was in complete view but doing little to warm the unbearable chill, and before he had time to think, it was his turn to run the oval.
In first gear he crept to the starting line, thinking, let's do this, let's do this, let's do this, and then BOOM!—you punch the gas and accelerate into second gear, getting in tune with your Corolla, practicing the instinctual secrets of the world's greatest lovers: getting real intimate with your baby, listening to her with not just an attentive but also a responsive ear, feeling her every pulse, her wheel's every spin, knowing just how hard to go, and what buttons to push, and when to push them, and increasing your speed faster and faster and faster—and now you shift into third gear and tension is building as your RPMs hit 4,000, then 5,000, then 6,000 and now approaching 7,000 and your blood is warming as the speedometer hits 75 mph, and you're thinking, ah, shit, don't let anything go wrong, ah shit ah shit ah shit, knowing the judges and crowd want to see you in absolute unity with your car, one spirit and one flesh like a marriage consummated, about to enter that interminable turn knowing that you can't let off the throttle even a bit because everyone will be able to tell and plus, you have to have balls to make it not only to the next round but then also to Formula D, the land of the sponsorships, and so you kick in the clutch and initiate the drift: Now your back wheels are gliding toward your front and you're drifting like a penguin on ice and feeling the eagle's liberation and it's as if the rest of the world has stopped for this moment and you are alone, suspended, free from friction, and you can't help but wish you could spread this moment and the beautiful feeling with which it swells your chest across the rest of time and just sail like a cool summer breeze from one corner of the Earth to the other until you have drifted over all of God's great creation in that state of pure relaxation that is so light and tensionless that you almost forget to downshift into second gear and maintain the drift through the end of the turn. And then you breathe, and finish the run.
"It's an addiction," Tommy would later say, after he just missed qualifying for the third and championship round. "You can say it's a sport, you can say it's a hobby, but I call it an addiction."
Twilight arrived in Rosamond on the first blanket of warm wind in the past 24 hours, just as the competition's champion, a Californian, was being crowned with praise from his peers and gift certificates to further enhance his car. Miyo took the last puff of his Marlboro, tossed it on the ground and smothered it with his shoe. But smoke continued to drift upward. Then the Vegasdrift team gathered their belongings, packed up their jaded tires and drove home.