One of the strange, cool things about getting invited to test days at Toyota Speedway at Irwindale in advance of the Formula DRIFT finale, October 17, is that the entire facility is pretty much deserted, or at least seems that way. The sound of straining motors as they reach for revs and the audible lack of traction, normally set against the roar of a crowd, just echo through an empty grandstand. Tire smoke meanders across lifeless midways and parking lots, completely uncelebrated.

It's like being in a ghost-town version of the House of Drift, and frankly a little spooky.

In contrast to the inactivity off track, there was much ado in Irwindale's bowl on October 7, a week and a half before the final showdown and the day KW Suspension decided to invite its drift teams to the short oval for some late-season testing.

The program was pretty cool. The day started with a semi-technical Q&A between KW managing director and chief engineer Klaus Frank flown in from their German headquarters for this even and the drivers and teams assembled, namely Justin Pawlak and Bergenholtz Racing, Dai Yoshihara and setup guru Mike Kojima, and Robbie Nishida and Eric O'Sullivan with Dynamic Autosports/Gruppe-S (Rhys Millen and RMR showed up later in the day).

After the Q&A, teams made their way onto the high-banked circuit for single-car passes through a mock up of the FD course. Frank and his KW crew sat at start/finish, ready to spring into action (pardon the pun) and affect any changes to suspension the drivers requested after each run.

The event piqued our curiosity because we would get to see one important element of what a drift team considers as it approaches a big event like the FD finale: setup - in this case for a banked oval and flat tarmac infield. With the goal of watching a team in action, we contacted O'Sullivan and Dynamic Autosports head Eddie Kim to see if they wouldn't mind us being a fly on the wall of their operation, and they were thankfully OK with it.

O'Sullivan is currently the regular pilot of the Rockstar Energy Drink Hankook Seibon 2004 Subaru Impreza WRX STi, a rear-drive conversion that carried the FD rookie from Ireland to his first series podium this summer, a second-place finish at Round 5: Seattle. The car is already fairly bulletproof in terms of build quality, and for springs and shocks Dynamic went with KW's two-way twin tube motorsports coil-overs.

The choice is apparently pretty popular among KW's pro drift squads, according to KW USA's Jay Chen. He tells us the same technology is available to consumers in other KW models, like the Clubsport line, which boasts dampers that are independently adjustable for both compression and rebound. Described as "performance setup for the racetrack," the motorsports dampers' also employ high-performance linear race springs.

It was O'Sullivan's first time driving Irwindale, and early in the session he let us know that in his first recon laps out the car seemed to push a bit, struggling with front grip. The team was weighing the option of running wider tires to alleviate the issue, but O'Sullivan was hoping they wouldn't have to, as that choice would mean sacrificing some much-desired steering angle.

In essence, it was up to Frank to provide that last bit of expert outside setup advice before the team would have to move to "Plan B."

The KW "philosophy" involves a number of principles, most of them having to do with controlling wheel movement to optimize the tire patch. It's why on cars that tend to induce a lot of rear-end squat – like drift cars – engineers almost like to see rear positive camber, so that when the vehicle's back half loads up it makes the rubber-asphalt handshake nice and meaty.

The outlook is also why the company insists that damper valving can affect a tire's usable footprint as much as springs or any other suspension component. In fact, it was primarily through adjustments to forward low-speed compression and rebound and rear low-speed compression that Frank got the STi's nose to stick, enough that O'Sullivan and Dynamic appeared genuinely pleased with the car's newfound agility by the end of the day.

(Not that our seat-of-the-pants evaluation is worth anything, but in our ride-along laps the car indeed seemed to be fairly smooth and manageable coming off of the bank.)

The remarkable thing is, Frank's instincts are so attuned that he didn't even need to get in any of the cars to know how to make them better. Watching each vehicle traverse the course and weighing the feedback he was getting from drivers was all that he needed to make his tweaks.

As for the rest of the teams, we understand that the Bergenholtz RX-8 had an axle failure and boned out early, while as we said previously Millen didn't pop in until the final hour of testing, leading us to think he probably has his Red Bull Genesis Coupe right where he wants it. Yoshihara in the Falken Tire/Discount Tire Nissan S13 seemed to be closest to being completely dialed in, tearing up the House of Drift at will.

The event seemed like a win-win for both teams and KW, if for no less a reason than it expands the company's standards in sponsorship support. Reaching out to the drifting world and backing up its team players with such expert advice and track time can only mean KW is thinking the sport has a place in the grand scheme of things. Love is always a good thing – especially when it's reciprocated.

www.kw-suspension.com/en/
www.gruppe-s.com/
ericosullivan.com

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