Formula Drift – Road Atlanta Race Report With Dean “Karnage” Kearney

BRIDGE RACING RACE REPORT
Formula DRIFT Round 2 – Road Atlanta

Formula DRIFT returned to Road Atlanta in Braselton, GA last weekend. Road Atlanta is known for its drastic elevation change encouraging super-fast entries leading into tight turns and a keyhole loop, which makes this an aggressive and technical course.

Thursday practice was held in intermittent rain. While the main race was forceasted to be dry, Dean and the team used this opportunity to collect wet data. However, the rest of the weekend was dry, not allowing for much dry set up data going into qualifying and eliminations.
The Top 32 in the series has really stepped up their game, both with driving and the quality of their machine. With so much parody, qualifying can be nerve racking for everyone involved. Dean threw down two awesome runs. Scoring a perfect line score on one of them filling the zones completely kissing one of the clipping points with his wing. With his precise driving, Dean qualified for the main event with scores of 82 and 83. This put us in the top half of the bracket qualifying in 13th place. This lined us up against Pat Mourdant in Top 32.

The team and the Viper went into the main competition fully prepared and confident. Dean had an amazing lead run with great speed, on a qualifying line with tons of angle. We were one of the three fastest cars all weekend, considerably faster than Pat in all of his runs we logged. So In his chase run, the team decided to be tactical with this data and give Pat some room in certain parts of the track. Our tactics failed. Pat found some speed and gapped us a little more than we liked. While we still had an advantage from our lead run and because Pat put a wheel off on the first clip, unfortunately the wind had stopped and the distance between the cars put Dean right in the middle of a blinding smoke cloud. This made finishing the course a guessing game. Trying to stay aggressive Dean, coming in blind, over shot the last turn coming back up the hill. This put him with 2 tires off and handed the win over to Pat.
While we are obviously unhappy with the results, there are lessons to be leaned. We couldn’t be more optimistic going into the next round. The team is functioning like a happy family and the car is performing the best it ever has with the support of all of our partners and their proven products. Dean is great on banked tracks and with the car being where it’s at, we are excited and confident for the next round in Orlando, Florida.