Groovy Drift / Autobacs

BY: Marc Marquez

The day started out with heat yet again, blistering early. At 7am it
was roughly around 85 degrees. As we pulled up, the set up of the
track was already completed an hour and a half before competition
time. Eric and I set up our tents to form our little "tent village" to
get the most shade out of the day. Registration began and people
stickered up their cars with the provided sticker sheet. I was able to
hand out a good amount of GDD stickers so that drivers would have the
option to use them for today.

The Type-T class was first and it went by rather too quickly. Almost
as if it were to say, "Let's hurry up and get this over with". For the
people that didn't qualify and didn't sign up for a different class
were out of luck. Their day ended really fast. I ended up qualifying
14th for some reason. People were very unsure as to how they were
judged during qualifying. The first battle that I faced was against
Aki, an employee of HPI in the R&D department. He is very skilled in
Type-A's and is a very, very good driver. We went on to go one more
time after 1 full battle and I ended up advancing to the next round
because of a spin on his part. My next opponent was James (Raine). He
is also a very skilled driver and would be a tough battle for sure. We
had several sudden death rounds in the round, and was a very very
exciting round of battle. I barely edged him out by a 6-4 decision by
the judges and moved on to the semi finals. As if things couldn't get
any harder, my next opponent was Gil from team Arai. The same scenario
went on here as we again had several sudden death matches. It finally
had to come to one final lap to decide who would move on. This time,
Gil was able to beat me by a score of 6-4 and I was now in a battle
for third. My opponent was Mac Cruz, my Touge Knights teammate. We
battled it out and I ended up taking 3rd place over all in the Type-T
class.

The next classes were beginner, intermediate and advanced. I also
entered the advanced class aside from the Type-T class. A new twist
was added as the GD staff decide to (after the advanced practice
session) to change up the track to make it more difficult. I felt that
this was kind of unfair. I know that we're in the advanced class and
all, but they should have done so before the practice session. In any
case, I qualified 3rd this time and would make it all the way to the
top 8. I then was eliminated by Mac Cruz this time and ended up taking
7th place in the advanced class.