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Professional Drifting as a Mainstream Motorsport - Continued
On August 31st at Irwindale Speedway, D1 will kick it up a notch by teaming up with NASCAR and challenging Nextel Cup stars, such as Kasey Kahne, Bill Elliott, and other professional stock car drivers, to drive sideways along with the world’s best drift drivers. To think, a sport once dominated by high-reving precision tuned Japanese imports is now being shared with America’s heartland racing heroes.
What does all of this mean to the sport of professional drift? It certainly means big exposure.ESPN2, for example, provided national television coverage of the D1 “Drag and Drift” event in Las Vegas, which was later broadcasted into millions of homes only weeks later.
Drag racing, only steps away from the drift course.
ESPN recently picked up rally racing for this years X Games 12, recognizing another non-mainstream competitive event as worthy of coverage. A specialty competition once only able to be viewed by the insiders of the sport, professional drifting could well be on its way to being classified as a mainstream racing activity in the near future. It also might not be too unrealistic to envision drifting as an event in an upcoming X Games (X-Games promoters, drifting would be equally if not more successful than rallying!).
Professional drifting will only need to piggyback on established forms of racing (CART, NASCAR, NHRA) for a limited amount of time to come. Drifting offers too many aspects of racing that people love, billowing smoke from incredible burnouts, high powered cars skidding parallel to each other only inches apart, and high speed crashes that one could not script for a movie. If enough people continue to discover and enjoy this skilled motor sport as the result of these hybrid events, as I believe they will with the right kind of promoters backing it, it should not be long before names like Yasuyuki Kazama and Samuel Hubinette will be in your local newspaper’s sports section.
To contribute to a discussion about drift being paired up with mainstream motorsport events, click here.
