The world has been waiting. Few builds have
had their progress monitored as closely as Driftworks’ AE86 but here it is…
finished and on full-chat!
Rules in motorsport are always changing.
Sometimes they change to improve safety or to attract new entrants. Often,
though, it’s a way of levelling the playing field, with the leading teams
usually suffering the most, allowing everyone else to play catch-up. Whatever
the reason, and perhaps it was a clever combination of all three, Maxx is
British Drift Championship (BDC) organisers introduced anew stipulation in
2013: that if a car’s engine had been moved back through the bulkhead it would
not be allowed to compete. The ruling meant that just one driver and team would
be excluded from competition: Phil Morrison and the Driftworks 2JZ-powered S15.
Toyota
Corolla Trueno AE86
“The S15 was incredibly competitive,”
conceded driver and Driftworks co-director, Phil. “We’d invested a lot in to
it, and it proved to be a really important car for us in terms of progressing
the business. So for numerous reasons we were gutted to have to sell it but in
a way the rule change helped us move forward yet further. We needed another car
and because of the success we’d had with the S15,everyone expected it to be
rather special.”
So when the team rolled out a rather battle
scarred R32 Skyline for the 2013 season, more than a few eyebrows were raised.
“Weessentially wrote off 2013,” fellow Driftworksco-director, James Robinson
explained. “There was no way we could sort out a new car in time for the 2013
championship, at least not built to the level that we’d be happy with. So the
R32 was just to get us by while we focused on our next big project.” As it
happens, the R32 holds huge sentimental value for the team. When Phil and James
decided to start Drift works back in 2004 both put their own personal cars up
front as investment to get things off the ground. Last year’s R32 is the very
car James put forward to help start the company ten years ago, so to have it
compete and for Phil to pilot it to a third-place championship finish was
actually very rewarding for the boys. In fact, if it wasn’t for a few
mechanical failures, it probably would have ended the season higher!
Toyota
Corolla Trueno AE86 engine
That said, despite the R32’s exploits on
track, Drift works was busy raising its global profile throughout 2013 via
another avenue: the build thread of this AE86. Over the past18 months, the
thread has received over565,000 visits and related video views number the
millions, making it one of the most anticipated cars we’ve ever featured. In
fact, we count it as somewhat of a privilege to be the first to bring you the
full story behind the project, as well as stunning photography of it in action.
But just how has Driftworks arrived at this point, days away from debuting one
of the finest yet outrageous Japanese cars we’ve ever seen at the first round
of the BDC at Lydden Hill?
It all started about two years ago. “We got
wind that there was an ASCAR for sale in the UK for a really good price,” Phil
explained. “At that point we were still running the S15 and had absolutely no
idea what we were ever going to do with an ASCAR but we had to have it, purely
for the amount of amazing parts that were fitted to it.” For those of you that
aren’t too familiar with ASCAR, it was a UK-based stock car championship that
was rebranded numerous times and ran between2001-2007 before eventually joining
forces with the CAMSO V8 championship and transitioning into the European Late
Model Championship in 2009.
If you’re clued up on iconic Japanese AE86s, you might
be looking at these pictures and telling yourself that you’ve seen this car
before
“The car we bought was actually sitting on
top of a small office in a workshop, being used as an elaborate ornament more
than anything else,” Phil chuckled. “The plan was just to strip it for parts,
but when the S15became ineligible in the BDC, we started looking at it in a new
light.” Phil and James began contemplating whether the ASCAR racer could be
more extensively utilised, perhaps as a full-on donor car for the next
Driftworks competition vehicle. All the guys needed now was a base car!
