As Formula DRIFT Returns To ROAD ATLANTA For The 20th Time, President/Co-Founder Ryan Sage, Revisits The Journey.

Professional Drifting is 20 Years Young in the United States.

In 1968, the U.S. professional NASCAR circuit was 20 years old, but it was still considered a very young motorsport at that point.

Certainly, driver names like Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, and Edward Glen ‘Fireball’ Roberts Jr. were finding their way into the mainstream, but the ‘idea’ of NASCAR had not yet become a household-known topic.

Fast forward 55 years, and pretty much everyone in the United States - young adult and above - has some knowledge of what NASCAR is.

The Sport Of Drifting In Perspective.

This is the perspective that many die hard drifting enthusiasts like us forget about when we all think about Formula DRIFT. We’ve been so deeply immersed in the evolution of the sport for a couple of decades now, so it seems like the rest of the world should be out there celebrating the 20-year milestone right along with us.

But, as NASCAR (and every other newly formed sport) has taught us, it doesn’t work that way.

Nevertheless, to coin a phrase recently used by FD’s president and co-founder, Ryan Sage, “What was once a fad, is here to stay.”

So, surely it’s the next round of decades that will give this young sport the full awareness and recognition it deserves.

Going Full-Circle On The Road To Atlanta.

If you tuned into last weekend’s FD live stream coverage of the first 2023 PROSPEC competition - which is now hosted at Michelin Raceway Atlanta - you might have heard Sage’s phrase repeated by Matt Soppa, who joined Jarod DeAnda on the comms for the PROSPEC event.

Soppa, a former ProAm driver, also has a number of years on the FD ground crew, guiding the drivers off the start line. If you missed his witty comments and valuable battle insights at FDATL, it’s worth tuning into FD’s PROSPEC livestream recordings (Knockout Qualifying, Top 32, Top 16), where you’ll hear Soppa share some fun stories about drivers and their rituals before rocketing over the line into battle.

The PROSPEC season launch at Road Atlanta, along with Soppa’s quips, added a new spice to a charm that already surrounds the annual event in Atlanta. And, it’s a charm that Sage and others often call out when reminiscing about former competitions at the track.

In fact, as Sage graciously walked us back in time, took us around a couple horseshoes, and then brought us into the future during a recent fireside (ahem… trackside) chat, he lauded the owners of the Atlanta raceway and FD’s historical relationship with them more than once.

Looking Back Means Sliding Forward For Formula DRIFT. 

In total, our visit with Sage was a fun opportunity to get inside the mind of someone that is arguably, one of the most notable influencers in professional drifting. We hope you’ll enjoy reading what Sage had to share:

Here we are 20 years later – do you feel like the initial dream has been fulfilled?

That’s a tough question, honestly, because the dream was never a ‘thing’. It was never like, if you get there, you got it. It really just started as seeing that there was something special about this sport, and feeling like if you didn’t do something, you would have left an opportunity on the side of the road. I have had goals for the sport as time has gone on, but I don’t know if I would ever describe it as ‘the dream has been fulfilled’.

I’ve had personal dreams fulfilled. You know, I get to do something that I love to do, and I’m constantly surprised and always reinvigorated by the changing dynamics of the sport. And, that’s something that I think a lot of people in their working relationships, or working environments, hope to be able to achieve.

Personally, yeah, there’s been a lot of that, but is there a place where we get to the island where the dream has been fulfilled for FD? I don’t know. 

In your words, how would you describe the evolution of FD?

The evolution is clearly multifaceted. There’s the car development, the driver development, all the things that relate to some of the causal factors that led the sport to be where it is from a media standpoint.

You could probably draw a parallel line in an upward trajectory from the time Facebook started and FD started using social media.

Drifting very much is a social sport and it makes a lot of sense in the social media sphere – especially with things like constant payoffs, scrolling, etc. It’s hard to narrow down the evolution specifically. but I think it’s in categories – cars, the drivers themselves, what the sport has done from a growth perspective. That evolution being very ‘grassrootsy’ and tv-centric in the beginning, to pretty much abandoning all of that, and then focusing on what we’re good at and doubling down on things like the Internet and social media. 

What about the operational side of the evolution (e.g. the tracks)?

On the track side, there’s definitely been some evolution. There’s certainly a higher preponderance of tracks wanting to get involved in the drifting business and that was not the case early on. It actually took some forward-thinking, open-minded people - like the people we’ve worked with at Road Atlanta - to kind of see that this could be something. But, for many, many years - and even to this day - there are still people that are very ‘anti drift’. Though I think that has changed less. We’ve always had between six and eight events, and the makeup of those events has more or less stayed the same, with a little bit of emphasis in shading. if it’s not Wall Speedway, then it’s Englishtown. If it’s not Vegas, then it’s Long Beach. And so on. 

Why does there seem to be a lack of support for drifting that isn’t there for other professional motorsports?

I think that will mentality age out.. I believe it has to do with drifting being essentially antithetical to racing. It’s never been about how fast you can get from Point A to Point B, and racing is so simple. You start ‘here’ and you end ‘there’ and you figure out how to get ‘there’ the fastest. Drifting just doesn’t have that lack of complexity. Not that other racing isn’t complex. Certainly, there are complex aspects of it, but it’s pretty simple from a conceptual aspect. Drifting has just never had that in its ontology - so to speak - its foundation and its nature. So, I think that’s a lot of the reasons why some have that mentality towards it. 

Looking back, is there anything you would have changed or done less of?

I can’t really pinpoint anything we would have done differently. Off the top of my head, and hindsight being 20/20, it probably would have been better to accelerate our investments in the digital realm earlier in the same way we did when we got off of television. We’d been spending so much money, and we had one foot in each of those domains, but television was so expensive. We were at a point where there were a few sponsors into it, and it was a nice calling card, but it wasn’t moving the needle. What was moving the needle was all the social stuff

The application for a drifting event is not like a stick-and-ball sport, or a race where you can fit it into a strict two-hour slot. You’re going to have OMTs (one more times), wrecks, and oil down. When you’re butting-up against another program, that doesn’t work. So, it’s taken some very open-minded people. Especially, over the Internet Protocol (IP) space, where it’s less constrained, and you have channels and things like that. We realized people want the content they want, and they’re going to figure out how to get it, so if there’s an available place for you to distribute your content – IP, YouTube, Facebook, or wherever – that’s where they are going to go. 

What would you like to see happen for the motorsport in 5–10 years?

Setting up a foundation where people can build businesses is really important to us – it’s always been important to us. The unique nature of drifting - such that, there’s somebody right now seeing this interview, that in a three-year period could be a professional driver - and you just can’t have that in other sports.

If I woke up tomorrow and said I want to be a professional baseball player, the probability of that is likely one in a trillion. It doesn’t matter how much energy I put into it. It’s just not going to happen. so, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same in football, martial arts, and other sports. You have to start early, then go and do it.

In drifting, there’s a thing that is so unique. You can be a kid that is semi into the sport, and even semi into driving, and then all of a sudden decide you’re going to invest all of your time and resources in it and give it a shot. I’ve seen that for tons of kids, but the problem is the passion for the driving part of it, doesn’t come along with the business acumen.

So, you can very easily fall into a trap where you burn a bunch of your own money, your parent’s money, or whatever, without learning the sponsorship game, the media profile-building game, and all those things that are constituent parts of learning how to run a program.

So, on the one hand it’s great, because it does allow dreams to be attainable for people. On the other hand, those dreams are going to shatter, if you don’t know what you’re getting into. 

Will FD consider extending a ‘judges recommendation’ license option to other ProAm circuits like what it has in place at HotPit Autofest?

Maybe. When I came into this position, we had a very convoluted ProAm setup, and it’s not the fault of my predecessors or anything. We had a lot of licenses that were being given out to a lot of groups. Once the demand for PROSPEC started elevating, and we started getting to the point where we were capping out on the number of drivers we could service, we had situations where drivers had to rollover their licenses and be in a waiting period. We had to address that, and part of doing so was figuring out which of the ProAm partners are the best partners to do the right thing on behalf of the brand.

Then, it came down to making the math of those licenses be consistent with the math of drivers coming out of PROSPEC, going back down to ProAm, or going up to PRO. The consideration in extending licenses to other groups is whether or not they can accommodate it in a correct way. That particular program [Hotpit Autofest] is kind of like a scouting program. They don’t say, “I will guarantee you a license.” They say, “Prove yourself to me and then I may have a right through Formula DRIFT to assign a license to you.”

Is FD hoping to continue making the Orlando stop in coming years?

It’s just the last year of their contract. We had a combined weekend round there, and there’s no way we could do what we did this year at that event, so we had to move that event to Road Atlanta because it holds everything up. Road Atlanta was willing to do the combined weekend with us in their new term, so now the car-cap count is ambiguous. We’re not going to go to 75 - there’s no demand or reason to go to 75 - but we can float around 37, 39, 42, or 43, and it won’t be a problem.

That does allow us to think about Orlando in a different kind of way. Orlando for us is an event that pays for ‘this’ event, because it’s a low-cost event that has a large number of attendees, which makes it so that these events can actually make sense. So, what we have to do if we are looking for a replacement for Orlando, is to find something that’s similar in scope to make that event make sense.

We love the market. We love Orlando. There’s just a certain kind of quality control that you want to have at your venues to make it consistent with the brand. The way Orlando is set up and what they can do to the track itself – at no fault of their own - is massively limited by the way the local government treats that property.

What prompts FD to make track layout changes like we’ve seen in St. Louis?

In one sense, a layout can change because we didn’t get it right the first time, or something along that line. The layout can change because the cars are doing things that they weren’t doing five years ago, so we have to make accommodations for it. A layout can change because it’s not as exciting as we want it to be.

For example, our first year at St. Louis had an awesome track layout. It was really cool, but the paddock and the grandstands had to be in that area, so we unfortunately outgrew it. The only way to make that event work was to move the event to the big grandstand area and have them pave an area for us. I think that was ‘okay’ for what it was, but it needs to get better.

Will FD be looking to add new tracks to its U.S. circuit?

What expansion comes down to is two components:

1. Is there a market and a track that can accommodate what we do, checking off all the boxes that we need to check (not half or three-quarters)?

2. Are the teams finding enough value in the expansion? 

I think swapping events out is not as difficult as expanding to a new round, because going back to the business acumen, teams would have to get one-eighth or one-ninth more funding to be able to do the other round. That round also has to fit into a certain timeline for everything from weather to where we are going along the season. That’s why we don’t zigzag. We do Long Beach; then we do the east coast swing; then we start coming back; then we hit the Northwest; and then we come back down. And, that’s just to minimize aggravation, and the cost that comes with teams traveling around the country.

What does the next 20 years of FD look like in your mind?

My personal goal is that this is a living. If you’re a PRO driver, then this is the living for what you do. We’ve made some really great strides with that, whether it’s from people that of themselves, are focusing just on the eight rounds and working with their sponsors and developing brand relationships and all that. Or, they’re doing that, plus they are opening up a shop. They are doing a secondary business that’s tied to drifting in some way.

Playing a catalyst role in any of those things - depending on what the driver wants to do - is a goal for me. I want people to say, “I am a professional drifter and it’s what I do for a living.” Not, “I do this on the weekends for fun and I work in a corporate nine-to-five the rest of the time.”

I would like everybody to be like Fredric Aasbo, Vaughn Gittin Jr., Ryan Tuerck, or Chelsea DeNofa, and be able to say this is what they do for a living. I think most of the teams that have done it right, understand the foundation is here, and that you can build off of it. So, the more money that comes into the sport, and the more exposure it gets, makes that dream more possible.

The Drifting Beat Goes On!

Thanks for your unfiltered thoughts, Ryan! Your insights on the professional motorsport of drifting are so valuable to our readership.

So, here we are. Two incredible events into FD’s 20th Anniversary season, with a different mix of PRO winners on the podium for each, a fresh set of PROSPEC R1 victors, and six more event stops to what’s shaping up to be an entertaining, edge-of-your-seat, and strategically pivotal 20th season.

And, if NASCAR’s journey is any indication, we still have at least 55 more years of the Formula DRIFT legacy to go! Can we get a WOOHOO from the crowd??!!!