Teesside is a fantastic venue for drifting, with the go-kart track offering a number of different circuit variations. Unfortunately, much like many UK tracks, the noise police have limited how many “loud” days the track can hold. As always it’s a real shame that such a great venue is almost going to waste, but on occasions they do manage to hold a number of drift days throughout the year. On Monday they held a practice day with a bit of a twist: 15 car limit, all cars must have roll cages and all drivers must up to a very competent level of driving.
With my car currently being in a broken state (once again) I hopped in with Ed “Struggle” Coley and we headed up from Manchester to Teesside hoping that we’d avoid the Monday morning rush hour traffic. This was only Ed’s second drift day in his recently built S13 (built from the components that survived his now imafous crash in his even more well-known purple S14) and, out of all of the drivers taking part, it was also the only car that wasn’t trailered to the track – fingers were crossed that nothing went wrong!
I spent most of the day riding shotgun in the car so didn’t get much chance to take any action shots – saying that though spending an entire day in a drift car on an almost deserted track is much more exciting than taking photos. That’s not to say the day was without incident though – take a look at the below video for some on-board crash footage. As you can probably tell from our laughing, we didn’t take it too seriously.
With the third round of this year’s BDC being held at Teesside in just a few weeks time there were a few teams booked in to attend but unfortunately two of these (Lassa and Slide Motorsport) had to pull out at the last minute. However, depsite this, the quality of the cars was pretty outstanding. Darren’s E30 is an epic machine sporting V8 power.
Ed Cobb’s Escort Mexico is hiding none other than an SR20 under the bonnet – a combination that works surprisingly well. The car has always been a pocket rocket since its completion, but after hearing Ed mention that the car was originally running just 0.5 bar of boost (which has since been upped to a much more manly level) I realised we were dealing with quite an incredible car. You can read my feature on this car from last year here: http://ej9.co.uk/?p=1032.
Also present was Gaz (or Gaz Moose as he is more commonly known) in his home brew S13. I got the pleasure of twinning extremely closely with Gaz for two laps of the international circuit layout while riding in Struggle’s car and I think it’d be fair to say that he was definitely on it.
Simple but effective is how I would describe his SR20 powered 200SX – there is nothing fancy here other than a well set up car and a skilled driver.
Due to the low number of participants the track time at Teesside was pretty much limitless which, considering the size of the circuit being used, made for some fantastic fun. I’ll post some more on-board footage once Ed uploads it.