Tennessee Drift At The Fairgrounds Speedway

Tennessee Drift at the Fairgrounds Speedway - August 21, 2010

Tennessee Drift is a web site formed to foster the sport of "Drifting" in Tennessee.  Drifting is not a well-known autosport, and according to their web site, "Drifting is the art of maneuvering your vehicle in a controlled slide around a course designated by clipping points, chaining corners together so that the vehicle is never pointed straight while maximizing angle, speed, and tire smoke.  Drifting is not judged by speed.  It is not limited to finishing first or passing another car to win.  Drifting is the perfect combination of speed, precision, and most importantly, style."  I hope they don't mind my borrowing the quotation from their seb site since it sums the sport up much better than I could.

I had heard of it but never seen it so when I noticed that they had a practice scheduled at the Fairgrounds Speedway I decided to go by and watch the event and take some photos.

It was COOL!  Everyone I talked to was great and I had a lot of fun watching the drivers do their thing.  It takes a lot of skill to keep a car under control under those conditions.  Imagine driving on wet streets and sliding broadside through corners.  These guys were doing that on asphalt.

So here we go with the photos.  Keep in mind that the cars aren't supposed to be pointed in a straight line down the track.  That's hard to emphasize with still photographs but notice how the are pointed in many of the photos since it isn't straight down the track.

The format was that each car ran two laps and then circled around the track to the back of the line to wait their turn again.  There were a number of cars there so I've grouped the photographs of each car together.  Each car's photographs were taken on numerous laps but I felt it would be easier for someone to find a particular car if they were grouped together.

Here's a multi-exposure around a corner.  It starts with the car coming off the back straight, drifting between the back and front straights, and then turning out onto the front straight.  Total time from start to finish: Slightly over 2 seconds.

I would also like to mention two things before the photos start:

1.  If any of the drivers want the photographs of their car removed from this page all they have to do is send me an EMail and let me know and I will immediately remove them.

2.  If any of the drivers want a copy of the photographs of their car all they have to do is send me EMail and let me know which ones and I will gladly send them the high-resolution originals.  The photos here are reduced in resolution a great deal, and the originals are much better.  I have a lot more photographs that I didn't post here.  I took about 700 but most of them are pretty much the same as those shown here.