If you’ve never seen a widebody BMW E46 wagon, complete with underglow, absolutely shredding a track sideways and at night then I feel sorry for you.
Drift Indy’s July Luau managed to include that and more. Hell, we even managed to see an S2000 tandeming with a Ford Falcon ute straight off the boat from Australia. Who had that on their grassroots drift event bingo card?
If you’ve ever doubted the “Style is King” claim made by some of our merch, please know that I spent the first hour of the event Friday helping Jordan Harmon install underglow on his sick AE86. Our wiring job was super clean, as long as you don’t look under the hood.
He didn’t even have the tires he was gonna drive on aired up, and it was the middle of the day, but you know we had to get the priorities taken care of first.
What sets the Luau apart from most of our events is that some of the style spilled out of the cars and onto the sick Hawaiian shirts most of the drivers donned for the weekend. The track was hot, but I’ll be damned if those shirts weren’t even hotter.
I’m not really sure what happened to make dashboard hula dancers fall out of style, but I was disappointed not to see a single one all weekend. That’s a missed, appropriate opportunity to break one out if you ask me.
By the end of the day on Friday we had just short of 50 cars on grid. The “tandems, trains and murdering each other” line up top was really popping and, aside from a few little fender benders, the event was largely accident-free. I did have to help push three or four cars off track Saturday, but it could always be worse.
I think the amount of trains and tandems being sent compared to the small amount of mishaps really speaks to the skill level of our drivers. I’m not a big numbers guy, but when you turn that many laps I feel like at a certain point there’s obviously a little more than luck keeping your car out of the wall.
Personally, I can't wait to see all that skill on display at Drift Indy Street League Volume 7. I feel like wee've got a special thing going with DISL and I love getting to watch everybody improving their driving at these in-between events. Keep it up, everybody.