As they say about one of those stick and ball sports, on any given Sunday any team can win. Well it’s the same in Formula Drift. As the 16th season of the sport got underway on the Grand Prix course in Long Beach, one week before the NTT IndyCar Series and IMSA take over that circuit, Odi Bakchis beat all comers to win the opening round. Yes, Odi Bakchis, the Likeable Lithuanian beat ‘em all.
That includes last year’s champion the Irishman James Deane, the champ before that Fredric Aasbo, and three-time titleholder Chris Forsberg. You never know what’s going to happen when two cars launch down that course and start squealing their tires.
Drifting is a judged sport sort of like automotive gymnastics or four-wheeled pairs figure skating. For each round of competition, a pair of cars slides sideways through a prescribed set of turns, trying to keep as close as possible to one another while the tires pour smoke and the drivers delicately balance oversteer in as close to a near-perfect powerslide as they can get, first in one direction, then another, then back again. Three judges look for good line, angle and style. If the judges can’t decide who wins, they ask for a “One more time” and the pair of cars do it all over again. 37 cars qualify on the first day to get into a field of 32, then single eliminations the next day knock them out one by one.
Such was the setup in Long Beach, where pairs launched down the GP course’s back straight and through four concrete-lined turns in front of stands packed with about 10,000 screaming, socially engaged, occasionally vaping youth.
In addition to the traditional Nissan 370Zs and 240SXs, Ford Mustangs and Chevrolet Camaros, there are competitors driving Corvettes, BMWs, one Cadillac ATS-V and there is even one guy in a Ferrari 599GTB. Bakchis drives a Nissan 240SX S14, a car so traditionally drift that you could use it to deliver tofu up Mt. Akina.
If you wanted to pick nits, you could point out that Bakchis had one of the easiest-ever ladder climbs through the field of 32. If this were a March Madness chart, there’d be claims of favoritism. But the chart and the path of “battles” for each competitor is done based on a mathematical formula for where each qualified, and Bakchis just happened to get the best corner of the chart. For instance, recent champions James Deane and Fredric Aasbo met each other in just the third round, with Aasbo taking that win to advance to the semi-final. You could argue that Bakchis didn’t hit a real strong contender until the semi-final round match against three-time champ Chris Forsberg. But when he did, he won it. And then he kept on winning, beating another unlikely finalist in Forrest Wang for the win.
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