Crick Filippi earned his Formula Drift PRO2 license last year in a qualifying series here in the San Francisco Bay area. Since then, Crick has been working hard to find the financing necessary to set off on his dream of becoming a professional driver in the world’s most competitive drift series. Getting the license is hard enough. Getting a professional program put together on a shoestring, blue collar budget is an entirely different challenge altogether. Unfortunately, Crick wasn’t able to make the first PRO2 event of the season, on the far side of the country in Orlando, from where Crick resides. But Seattle seemed manageable. The one thing keeping him from his goal now was a car.
Continue reading Crick Filippi – Formula Drift Rookie Hits the Road
Orlando Speedworld is not a venue new to drifting. It actually holds regular events that guys like Pat Goodin, Chelsea Denofa, Alec Hohnadell, and others in the state of Florida have driven on. So, it’s not hard to expect drivers like Kelsey Rowlings to make it into the Top 16. However, drivers like Alex Youe, Pat Cyr, Kasey King, or even Kenji Yamanaka would be names from outside of Florida you’d also expect, but you’d be left scratching your head as they did not make it. Pat crashed while Kasey experienced car troubles, and Kenji just didn’t perform as we expected him to. Instead, we found names like Andrew Gray, Faruk Kugay, Brody Goble, and number one qualifier Alex Heilbrunn on the list. However, that number one qualifier shouldn’t be much of a surprise, as two of the five rounds of the Just Drift “Top Drift” series are done on ovals similar to Orlando Speedworld, though the “whoops” section in the middle was probably a new experience. Same goes for Brody Goble who drove in the Evergreen Drift Series, which ran exclusively on the Evergreen Speedway oval that Formula Drift will see after New Jersey.
