UCE DriftCross

Finally, we got the car back from the Caribbean the last week of August. This was perfect timing as a new drifting organizer, University Car Events, was planning a “DriftCross” the next weekend really close to our HQ.

University Car Events or UCE is a spinoff from the University of South Florida’s normal car meet events. The same staff has started to put together events more involved than just hanging out. So the “DriftCross” was setup to be half day auto-x and half day drifting. I jumped in to help because of how local they are to me, I wanted to make sure it went well and because it’s my community- I should be there! I offered to bring the car and to be an instructor for any who chose to ask for help. UCE was grateful and accepted my offer. Oddly enough, the event was being held in a local high schools parking lot, across the road from the sister middle school where I substitute teach!

We showed up early to put up our tent and make a pit area so the car was on display for auto-x. I wanted to support the whole day and not just the drifting later on as well.  The event was a little shaky on keeping schedule since it was their first, but it went pretty well considering. I even jumped in the auto-x line for a run. Sadly, I couldn’t resist and less than halfway through the course, traction was broken and we ended up not getting it back until the course end- we didn’t hit any cones though!  Unsatisfied with my lack of self-control, I forced myself to do one real run, no drifting. It was rather boring and I did overshoot one corner, but still pulled a respectable time (in the top 5 of the day) without making any other runs to iron out the hiccup.

Once we shifted to drift mode, another highly respected local driver Charlie Thompson and I designed the course. The drifting started and the course was awesome. After my sister-in-law got her first ride ever in the car since the LS swap, the “Drift Taxi” portion was announced. UCE was allowing random spectators to pay for a ride-a-long, and split the money with the drivers. The spectators got to choose the car, so the better drivers got customers. I had a line. Which was great, but also made for havoc because of the long staging line for cars. While constantly rotating people in the car, I also instructed a few drivers- most didn’t ask for help. With the help from Cody, my crew, we changed tires for more customers and headed back out.

The police showed up and hassled UCE into shutting down 2 hours early. So everyone was shorted on runs and the Drift Taxi had to refund 3 people who had paid but not gotten in yet. Since we were splitting the funds, it hit us as well. The organizers with UCE knew they legally were ok to be there, they want to keep a good relationship with the police for future events so they called it.

UCE DriftCross - Drift Taxi from Jason Jiovani on Vimeo.

The event was a success and we hope to have another in a month or 2. This time, more runs for everyone and a better designed Drift Taxi system to try to share the passenger load and get more drivers making some money.