Stephan Verdier uses the Enkei RPF1 Racing Series Wheel
From Stephan Verdier: The seattle event started pretty good. It’s a really fast entry course, 4th gear into a right long bank then into the infield for 2 more turns. The finish is a 180 really sharp turn in 2nd and you exit right by a wall. Practice on Thursday went well, it was 95 degrees but the car never overheated, not like me. I was struggling a bid at the beginning with our set up but after Costa made a few changes the car was perfect. Going into Friday practice before qualifying i was really confident that it will be good. The practice went according to plan until the last 10 min when i felt a big vibration coming from the gear box. First we thought it was the drive shaft, we changed it but no difference. We couldn’t change the gear box on time for qualifying so we decided to run it like this and hope it last. 1st qualifying run: i wanted to put a nice run down to get a score on the board but not take too much risk. It started well, i was a bit low on the entry of the bank but brought it back up, in the entry of the infield you need to use the ebrake and when i did it broke. I was without ebrake for the rest of the course and you need it 2 more time. I manage to get a score but it wasn’t a really good one. Before the 2nd qualifying run we were able to replace the master cylinder for the ebrake and the gear box was still holding. 2nd run: This time i had to go for it. It started perfect right by the wall, going into the infield the ebrake worked perfect, next turn perfect, last turn i got on the gaz hard to finish with a bang, I came a bit to close to the wall, hit it with the rear witch sucked the front end in it too, and lost the drift 5 feet from the finish. No score. Luckily my first score was good enough to put me in the show.
I drew the Falken Sky for my first battle. By Saturday morning we had he car back 100 % ready for battle. The morning went great, no issue, the car was fantastic. I knew it was going to be hard to beat the Sky. The car is 500 pds lighter than mine and has 200 more horsepower. But I knew there was a chance to beat him.
1st run: I was following, I entered the bank a car length behind and keeped that distance all the way into the infield, i closed the gap a bit in the braking but he was able to put some gap on me on the acceleration. Slight advantage for him.
2nd run: I was leading. Perfect entry on the bank and he was a car length behind me. Fast entry on the infield and that’s where he was able to close the gap and stayed glued to me for the rest of the run. He won, I went home. He ended up finishing 3rd in the ompetition.
We are back in Los Angeles now, changing the car into rallycross spec for the X-Games. Our next event for drifting is Las Vegas end of August.
Thanks everybody for your help. – Stephan.
