Drifting has always appealed to me as a bystander due to its spectator-sport nature. I remember great times as a teen with no driver’s license, finding a way to get to Mallala (South Australia’s main race circuit) with friends to watch our local heroes go sideways.
It astonishes me to fathom that drifting has hung around in Australia for close to 20 years now. The art of overstreer delicacy was introduced to Australia by the legendary Danny “Denzo” Vahoumis in the late 90s when he witnessed drifting with his own eyes on the streets of Japan. Denzo brought the sport back to his home town in South Australia and the rest was history.
Australian drifting has come along way and entered numerous phases. In the early days, simply holding a slide around one corner was considered skillful. Since then, numerous bodies as well as competitions were established and at one point, the sport was spoilt with a major nationals series in the form of Drift Australia (DA) in 2006. DA ran for about 3 years before it went bust due to the Global Financial Crisis and personally for me, was the peak of drifting in Australia. The DA series held national rounds at most of the major cities in Australia, had backing from large corporate sponsors, national TV coverage and a very professional look and feel to it (which I know some people hate). But most importantly, it was the quality of the cars during this era of drifting that got me excited. The hero FR cars of our scene were still relatively modern and with most drivers and teams backing sponsors, the quality and presentation of machinery was impeccable. Auto Salon/Industrie Clothing’s chrome S15 Silvia, Commercial Truck Sale’s Ichigo 180SX, GT Autosound’s twin turbo LS7 BNR34 Skyline GT-R, Holford Motors’ S14a Silvia, and Japanese Motorsport’s “S13.6” Silvia were a few of my favourites. However, the quality of all the players on the the field were way up there. I have to pinch myself again after a quick google image search of the above to realise that they were indeed drift cars from 10 years ago.
After the death of DA in 2008, numerous organisations stood in place to keep drifting alive in Australia. I give lots of kudos to these groups as without their presence, drifting as a mainstream form of motor sport in Australia would be dead. Drift Challenge Australia (DCA) is one of the newer created series and when I discovered that drifting OG Luke Fink (former driver of the aforementioned Holford Motors’ S14a above) was the man behind it, I knew I had to attend an event. Fortunately, round 2 of the DCA series was held in South Australia. Despite the track (or in this case, closed-road track) being stationed 450 kilometres away from me, I decided to make the 5 hour commute down to Mt Gambier from Adelaide.
DCA places emphasis on its series as a grassroots competition. Competitor costs are kept as minimal as possible, strict tyre control are in place to ensure a level playing field, and tight door-to-door battles are highly encouraged.
Round 2 of DCA’s event, dubbed King of the Hill, was hosted in Mt Gambier, South Australia. I’m not sure how Luke Fink convinced the Mt Gambier council to shut down a stretch of winding roads in Valley Lake for this event, but the end result was truly astounding. It was practically legal street drifting!
There were two competitions held during the event, in the form of the South Divisional series on Friday and the DCA national series on the Sunday (with qualifying and battles for top 32 scheduled for Saturday). Due to other commitments, I was only able to attend the South Divisional competition but the drivers still put on a crazy, smoke engulfed show.
Battles were tight throughout the day. After a couple of re-runs, the judges eventually crowned Tasmanian, Matt Harvey (in his very professionally presented red S13 Silvia) as the winner, defeating South Australian, Scott Miller (in his white S14 Silvia).
Victoria will host the next round of the DCA series, followed by Queensland. Luke Fink and his team have done a tremendous job in getting DCA (which was launched in 2014) up and running and I hope that the series is able to hang around for a while. However, I do miss the glamorous, larger scale and huge corporate-sponsored series that was Drift Australia (now defunct). Perhaps one day when all the stars align, we’ll get a similar series once again in Australia. Until then, we have to be grateful to organisations like DCA for keeping the drifting lifeblood pumping in this country.
