Downey, CA) Deemed as one of the favorite tracks by many of the pro level drivers in Formula Drift, the JIC USA / Hankook Tire Drift team made way to the Evergreen Speedway in Seattle, Washington to showcase their skills and hopefully come out with a strong result. The first day of practice the drift team caused some buzz in the pits as the Porsche had made it’s first appearance ready to showcase its ability to drift for the first time. Tyler strapped in and did a short but effective demo run. The run can be seen here on The Driftzone’s website: http://www.thedriftzone.com/liveblog/2007/07/13/porsche-gt2-drifting/. This showcased the ability of the Porsche to slide around effortlessly. However, the Porsche is merely in its testing phase so the team opted not to use the Porsche GT2 for this event but will be going in full force at Round 5 in Infineon, CA to really outperform the competition. Tyler again went into the Nissan S14 for the final time at this event to showcase his talents and keep the championship points.

On Saturday, for the top 32 qualifiers, Kenji drove the Nissan S15 in a stellar performance landing him overall 4^th qualifying spot. Tyler also showcased an aggressive qualifying run to land him in the 12^th spot. For the first round of Top 16, Kenji was pitted against Robbie Unser of Enjuku Racing. Both Kenji and Robby put up a good fight but Robbie made a driving error by hitting the wall which gave him zero points letting Kenji move on to the Great 8. Tyler on the other hand, was going up against Rhys Millen in the Red Bull / GM Solstice. These two are no strangers going against each other and Tyler went head on into this round. In the first lap, Rhys made huge error by spinning out giving Tyler the advantage. In the second lap, Tyler showcased his top skills to overtake Rhys giving him the go head to the top 8.

The Great 8 round was an odd one as the bracketing system put both Kenji and Tyler against each other. This is the first time in the Hankook Tire drifting team that this has happened and this was going to be an interesting match up. In the end of the round, Kenji came up victorious by a slight margin. Regardless of Tyler’s journey ending at the top 8, this put Tyler 9^th in overall championship points.

In the Semi-Final rounds, Kenji was put up against Dai Yoshihara of the Rockstar Energy Drink Silvia S15. In the first lap of the round, Kenji and Dai put up an amazing show of skill and high speeds. The judges both game them equal amount of points which did not give any room for mistakes. It was a do or die situation. The second lap, Dai lead as Kenji followed. As they came up to the first main banking corner Kenji came extremely close to Dai forcing Kenji to let off the throttle. Doing so, the car caught grip which cause a ‘passing move’ and the crowd went crazy over it. Due to the rule that Formula Drift has on passing, the round was given to Dai and Kenji now had to go for the 3^rd place spot.

In the other semi-final round, the vehicle that Kenji was supposed to battle for the 3^rd place spot, unexpectedly crashed into the wall, which gave Kenji a bye run. This solidified his 3^rd place win. Kenji accumulated many points which puts him 5^th in overall championship points! Special thanks goes out to:

Hankook Tire USA (http://www.hankooktireusa.com), Works Bell, A SPEC, ECKO UNLTD, Exedy Clutches, Stoptech Brakes, Tomei Powered, Instyle Graphics, Cobra Seats, Vertex T&E, Seibon, APR Performance, Sparco USA, Turbo By Garrett, and Meguiar’s.

Written by: Yukio Taira; JIC USA