Short Track Drift- QLD Style by Wreck’em

Hey there,

It has taken me some time to write this article mostly due to my laziness but partly because I didn’t know how to start this. I think Waz (MGNinc) was hoping for a solid Australia VS New Zealand build up to tie in well with your guys assault on our shores at W.T.A.C in August, but this is an angle I feel I can’t take.

In Australia right now the drift scene is in a mixed chaos.

You have event promoters pushing events in the wrong direction, you have people who have been in the game long enough to know what moves should be made but because of egotistical reasons choose not too, you have drifters fighting online after an event because a photographer took a photo of some one else’s car and not theirs, “But I’m a better driver then they are” .

This is all starting to sound very… un-drift like?

Well I think it is. I could go deep into how developments in social media have created an attention seeking society that needs to feed its egotistical urges 24/7, I could then paint a really shitty picture of the Australian Drift scene, but I wont. You see all this nonsense makes me angry, rage builds up inside me and seeing as I am unemployed I have 24 hours and the 7 days in a week up my sleeve to punch it all out in the air. I have copious amounts of time to construct ideas/plans and then deconstruct them to help oppress the rage. I have all the ideas. And with everything in life you can have the ideas but you need the other half of the package to go with it…

…

I don’t quite have the full package yet (one day I will) which is why I am thankful that Steve and Neil Lewis are living humans! Steve and Neil are sons of Queensland Raceways top dude Keith Lewis. Thankfully for Queensland drifters, Steve and Neil love drifting and are most definitely responsible for giving Queensland its number 1 drift state in Australia tag ( A few egotistical heads will try and fight this claim, but its track days/good times galore up here). When I caught wind that Steve and Neil were planning on running a Short Track competition I was more than excited to put my 2 cents in. I was even more excited when Steve and Neil replied, happy to take in what I had to say. Over the course of the next few months Steve and Neil put in solid ground work checking in with some of the more key heads a long the way to see if things could be done better

The aim of the Short Track competition wasn’t to get all prim and proper and try and run a National series, it wasn’t to claim that we have the most pro drifters attending. It was to strip back all the crap and take drifting back to the basics. Back to why people get involved in the first place. Drift competitions in Australia are setting themselves up for failure by throwing multiple misleading labels on their event. They’re trying to be something there not.

The Short Track IS a pure drift competition. Drivers are out there to put on a good show and enjoy themselves. Drivers come from all walks of drift. You have Rob Whyte in his Monster backed 350z against Todd Waldon (Internets S13) in his “I needed a car to compete in short track with” s13. There’s the grassroots guys who complete train runs during downtime of the competition and of course there’s the fans. All walks of drift combine during the course of the night to help make it entertaining. A testament to this successful formula is the crowd numbers. If a local drift competition held on a Friday night can reel in a higher crowd than a 2 day ran- weekend held “National” event *cough ADGP cough*then surely we must be doing something right? And it wasn’t just a one off, the Short Track competition runs 3 rounds and each consecutive round saw the attendance rates higher then the last.

Now this wasn’t meant to be a bash on other event promoters or to boast how rad the Short Track competition was. No this I was hoping would be a message to the people. Many naysayers in Australia love seeing what everyone else in the drift world has and then they proceed to hang shit on their own home scene. I don’t understand why everyone is so keen on what everyone else is doing. Australia needs to do its own thing. Become proud of its own scene. There are a lot of great things about the Australian Drift scene. Nothing is ever too hard, good things require hard work. Australia Stop Faking the Funk.

Hopefully you can feel what I’m putting down here in the video I made. My aim was to show how much of an awesome atmosphere drifting creates when all the moves made are for the right reasons.

Short Track from Mez on Vimeo.

Thank you for reading my thoughts

Cheers Sam

P.S – If you are wondering who the hell I am, my name is Sam but everyone calls me Mez. I have been filming drift for nearly 4 years now and I run the label Wreck ‘Em. We film things but were also expanding into doing other big things as well but more on that in another instalment

Photos provided by Grant from Excitementcarmag

www.excitementcarmagazine.com

& Scott from TPRMedia