It was a warm, October Saturday night in Southern California. The kind of weary calm that typically follows a day of triple-digit heat blanketing the Los Angeles basin. Most of its citizens readied themselves for another day of the same torment, maybe squeezing in a relaxing night on the town. Most, but not all.

On L.A.’s industrial outskirts, the town of Irwindale had seen its population grow almost tenfold in the preceding hours, all contained within the half-square-mile footprint of the “House of Drift,” Irwindale Speedway. If you’ve ever been to its annual Formula Drift season finale, you’ll know it doesn’t take physics to predict the result of that rapid influx of mass and energy on such a concentrated area. And in that moment, no one felt the heat and pressure more than Fredric Aasbo.

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