Lets Talk About Fredric Aasbo and Formula D

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First of all, let me preface this by saying that my opinion is going to be bias, because I’ve never really been a huge fan of the American interpretation of professional drifting, AKA Formula D. It’s not that I actively dislike it, or find it massively inferior to its equivalents across the ocean (although I’m not completely immune to a bit of good-natured smack talk now and then), it’s just that I usually find myself presented with other options that I would rather watch and follow instead. Competitions such as the Irish Drift Championship, Drift Allstars, and the D1 series, just to name a few.

That being said, I have followed FD more closely for the last two years, as I’ve been surrounded by people who are major fans (or even participants), and it’s grown on me. More than that, even, I really appreciate how instrumental FD has been in bringing drifting into the American mainstream, and expanding the sport as we know it. So what follows is meant to be just my opinion on how I feel about the last couple years of FD, and how I think it could be improved going forward.
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As we come upon the 2016 Formula D Final Fight here in just a couple of days, I find myself remembering a conversation I had just about a year ago, less than a week after the 2015 Final Fight, with a friend who has crewed on an FD Pro team for many years now. It had been a big year for Formula D, and even more than that, it had been a big year for one driver in particular: Fredric Aasbo, who had been a shoo-in for the championship like halfway through the season. As I stood outside of the shop where my friend worked, as he smoked, I came to this realization that my friend had probably been face-to-face with Aasbo (who was like a mythic creature in my mind at the time) many times over the past couple years. I couldn’t resist popping a probing question about him.

“It must have been a rough year for you guys,” I said, “with the entire community basically deciding that Aasbo was going to win five whole months ago.”

He stared off into the distance, and the chuckled to himself as he puffed on his cigarette. “Oh, Aasbo,” he said, smiling, “The truth is… he ran a very conservative season. He didn’t really take any risks when he battled, which is what I thought this sport was about. We certainly did.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” he said, “You know Papadakis racing, the team that owns Aasbo and built his car?”

I nodded in response.

“Well, they’ve been around for quite a while,” he said, “I remember when I was in highschool, before drifting got big, the business of modifying imports made all it’s money on drag racing. I remember seeing pictures of Papadakis drag cars in all of my import magazines. They were big in the drag scene then, and when the focus switched to drifting, they switched their focus with it. They’ve always been a big player, and they’ve always had big money.”

“Do you think they buy out the judges?” I asked.

“It’s not even that,” he said, and sighed. “At the end of the day, despite the fact our team car has a tubed chassis, a built engine, custom suspension, etcetera, at its core it’s still basically just a modified [REDACTED]. Now look at the two cars that Papadakis is fielding, they’re not even natively rear-wheel-drive. They have the resources to engineer an entire car from the ground up to do one thing and one thing only -compete in Formula D. Then they throw a Scion or a VW body on top of it for the purposes of marketing.”

“So you think it’s become more about who can build the best car instead of who’s the best driver, essentially?”

“Yeah, and it’s kind of sad.”

Now that I’ve transcribed that conversation, I would like to change topics for a moment, and direct your attention to something called “Lights, Motors, Action! Extreme Stunt Show!”

Lights, Motors, Action! is a live performance that used to be put on at Disney World in Florida, and has since moved to Disney’s theme park in Paris, France. As you might have been able to guess from the video clip, the basic premise of the show is to do a live movie car-chase scene, complete with jumps, drifts, and explosions. It’s a lot of fun to see in person, and I’m thankful that I got the opportunity to do so before they packed it up and moved it across the ocean.

What makes LMA! even cooler, though, is that at the end of the performance they take you step-by-step through how a car chase scene in a movie is constructed, and show all of the technology they use. The “Hero” car in the show (the red one you see in the video) is not based on any production model, and is completely custom designed and built by-and-for the show. But, there’s more than one of them. What they reveal when they are demonstrating how they make movie magic with automobiles, is that there’s essentially a different “Hero” car for every single stunt; one for jumping, one for drifting around, one for jumping and drifting around backwards. Every custom built vehicle in the show has one, and only one task that it is required to perform, and it’s engineered from the ground up to perform that one very specific task. That’s not to say the drivers aren’t extremely skilled, but the vehicles are meticulously built around their one and only job, to remove the probability of human error as much as possible. This is because nobody is trying to prove anything, it’s a performance.

I’m guessing by now everyone sees the comparison that I’m about to make, and I would ask politely that before you go the comments section to flame me, please listen to what the rest of what I have to say.

Just to reiterate the obvious, I feel like Papadakis Racing (not necessarily Formula D as a whole) has decided that -because they have the money to do so- they’re going to approach competitive drifting with the same attitude as the creators/managers of Lights, Motors, Action! From the ground up they’ve built two vehicles that are so specifically engineered to do one thing and one thing only -win Formula D- so that they can eliminate the dangerous human element from their chances of winning, as much as possible. They can’t really be faulted for this; once you get beyond the safety regulations, FD has some of the most lax car building rules in the sport, so it’s kind of hard to blame someone for taking advantage of that. And the result (their Scion TC and VW Passat) is irrefutably a masterpiece of engineering, not to mention extremely bad ass. But in my personal opinion, the sport has suffered for it.

Fredric Aasbo will enter the Final Fight this weekend as the second place driver in the standings, which means he has a very real chance of going home with his second consecutive championship, and an almost guarantee that he’ll end up on the podium. But for the entire season, he has been the single most boring driver to watch. At its best, his driving style lacks personality, and at it’s worst is unapologetically dull. His apparent inability to take risks and challenge himself and the limits of his machine has made his battles yawn-inducing, and unless one of my favorite drivers is lined up next to him, I find them difficult to watch. Nothing against him, I’m sure he’s a decent guy, and I don’t really think he’s to blame for this. Quite the opposite in fact. My point is that, why would he push a machine that is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, well within its natural limits? Papadakis racing doesn’t want their wins to rely on a human that has to think on their feet and operate a vehicle completely outside the realm of its original purpose, because technology is infinitely more predictable.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to blame the judges for their calls. After all, the car is doing precisely what it’s supposed to; hitting all the clipping points, keeping its speed up, maintaining good angle. Almost as if it was on rails. And I’m willing to bet that if Papadakis was allowed to lay rails down on the track before the start of the event, they probably would.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some seriously shady calls in Aasbo’s favor.

So now that I’ve talked about how technology is affecting Formula D, now let’s talk about money. This bit is going to sound like even more of a conspiracy theory than what you’ve already read. Please note that I’m not making accusations or attempting to present my opinions as absolute fact. Everything that follows is nothing but SPECULATION, so please treat it as that.

On Facebook, Fredric Aasbo’s page is liked by almost 300,000 individuals. Now compare that to the 25,000 garnered by Tyler McQuarrie, who faced Aasbo in Orlando and by every right should have won after the first run, much less be cut down unfairly after two retries. We can read as deep into this as we want, but at the end of the day statistically Aasbo has more fans, and that means more people paying to tune into the live stream, watch advertisements, or actually buying tickets and physically showing up in order to see him drive. In the grand scheme of things, I think it is logical to assume that Aasbo nets a bigger profit for Formula D per-competition than McQuarrie does, by a very large margin. If someone with a formal education in statistics wants to refute me on this, I’m happy to listen.

One of the major things that separates drifting from other forms of motorsports is the elimination style of the competition. In circuit racing, even if you’re in dead last you can still be in the race from start to finish. This in turn means that anyone who has tuned in or physically showed up to watch you drive is going to get their money’s worth. Not so in drifting. Based on this model, it would make sense that FD makes more money when fans of popular drivers believe their driver is going to win than when fans of less popular drivers do. Do you see what I’m getting at?

If McQuarrie (or literally anyone else) had beat Aasbo in Orlando, how many more people would have immediately turned off their live streams, or suddenly became less interested in buying tickets to see Formula D when it came to their region? If Aasbo had been eliminated in the Top 32, how would it have affected the net profit of the next race? If Papadakis Racing started consistently losing and suddenly decided they were no longer interested in competing in Formula D, how much potential profit would FD lose as result? Probably a lot more than what they would lose if Tyler McQuarrie decided to walk away from the sport. The reality is that there’s probably a vested interest in Aasbo and other high-profile drivers continuing to win.

I don’t want drifting to ever go away, I love it. It gets me right in my soul and I never feel more connected to the universe when I’m watching two screaming cars fly past me sideways at speeds I wouldn’t even think was possible. I don’t want Formula D to go away either, because it’s what we’ve got and it’s given so many drivers not just opportunities, but goals and dreams to focus on and strive to achieve as they spend sleepless nights in their garages tooling on their machines, or working jobs they hate just so they can afford to pay for tires and gas for that next event. Drifting is awesome, and violent, and beautiful, and it’s fostered one of the best motorsports communities in existence. Within that community I’ve found some of the best people I’ll ever know, and I hope to meet many more.

Drifting as a sport has already changed and improved so much over the relatively short amount of time it’s existed, so as a community we have to figure out how it can be improved more. How can the structure of the competition be modified so that fans of certain teams aren’t left feeling disappointed if they paid for tickets only to watch their favorite driver get eliminated in the first round? How can we amend the rules to where the focus is brought back to the raw talent and audacity of the driver, instead of the ability of his/her machine?

Maybe you think there is nothing wrong with the sport at all, and you want Formula D to never ever change for as long as you watch it, and if that’s what you believe I truthfully respect your opinion. In turn, I ask that you respect mine and refrain from being unnecessarily insulting if you have something to say in response to what I’ve written. I want to hear your opinion, regardless of whether or not you agree with me. So, what do you think?