Alec Robbins NST 350Z Formula Drift Utah Recap

Another round in the books! This one going down at Utah motorsports campus just outside salt lake. This is my favorite track of the series with its open and super fast banked corners. Hitting entry speeds into the triple digits and carrying 50-70 mph through the course is wild! 

Practice went well and we nailed the car setup right off the trailer. We were able to get all of our runs in and the car was running great! We focused heavily on chase runs in practice knowing competition would likely come down to that.

Our qualifying run suffered a little bit from that, having a little bobble on initiation that cost me severely in points. However the rest of the run was awesome. Judges scored us pretty harsh and we ended up back in 24th place.

This put us up against Dean kearney in the top32. I knew I had to drive hard chasing first. And our chase practice payed off. I was able to initiate on his door and had a great chase behind him. However his lead was also super good. In the lead position I knew I had to just hold things together with a good line and we should be good! I had a good initiation and nailed the first inner and outer zones. Coming into outer 2 I was right on going into the zone but when I got back on throttle the car pulled into the corner and I fell out of the zone for a second before working the car back into it. Then in zone 3 I pushed hard and dropped one tire off the track while filling the whole zone. Meanwhile Dean was a few car lengths back the entire run. I felt great and thought for sure we had the win, however the judges sited kearneys poor follow to the few small mistakes in my lead and my great chase was because of his great lead. It was definitely an odd call in our eyes. However we put the car back in the trailer running and ready for round 8 in a few weeks!

WORDS: Alec Robbins
​PHOTOS: FormulaD

NST - NonStopTuning
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