LOOKING UP WITH UPSOAR. 

If you’ve never heard of UPSOAR DRIFT, get ready for a fun introduction. This three-person drifting team is run by the newly engaged couple Sharon Mangen (@sharwag) and Lyron Miller (@twitchdrift) from New Jersey. As a traveling drift team, they’ve been making waves across social media for some time now. You’ll for sure want to check out their fun posts on the drifting expeditions they’ve been making up and down the east coast and beyond, including a recent Drift Week foray.

DRIFTEM media correspondent Andrei Popov spent a little time with the couple at Englishtown’s Raceway Park, and here’s the abridged version of their trackside chat, where everything from their unique vehicles, to what it’s like to drift and wrench together, to where they’d like to head next was discussed (watch the full interview on the DRIFTEM YouTube channel).

How did UPSOAR DRIFT come about and how did you both get into drifting? 

Lyron:  Well, when I was trying to think of a team name, I wanted to have ‘soar’ in the name, and that was the only thing that worked out. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something that popped up and sounded ok. 

Sharon:  My first year was COVID, so I did one event, and then it was shut down. This is my fourth season and I really started because of him. I saw his car, and his fun stuff, and I wanted to participate. I didn’t want to be a passenger, so I had to get my own car and get into it. 

Lyron: I technically started in 2005 with my Mitsubishi Evo. It’s not really a drift car and it was still all-wheel drive (AWD), but I started in Club Loose in the parking lot*. Then, I got rid of the car in 2007, and in 2009, bought the Soarer and have been driving that since. I also stopped in 2011, then started back up in 2019, so I took a little break. 

*OG Club Loose started in the parking lot of Raceway Park rather than the road course where it is now. It’s a way for drivers to reference how long they’ve been around. 

The Evo is a car predominantly used in Rally or Drag racing. How did you avoid all that and end up in drifting? 

Lyron: I don’t know, I ripped up the handbrake, and tried to slide it. I used to do mainly big doughnuts and stuff. I could do corkscrews, where you just spin real tight. I could do that with no hands, which was kind of cool, but here (Club Loose) it was a little different because the pavement wasn’t that good. You had to try to maneuver the corners through cones and other things, so it was really difficult. I went through so many more tires because it was AWD. 

Why the Soarer platform specifically - 240s were so cheap back then? 

Lyron: Well, I always wanted to be different. When I started off in cars, it was car shows and I had a Ford Escort ZX2, which is like the Soarer but, it’s front-wheel drive. I ventured out to far away car shows, and then the very first car I ever saw drift was a Soarer - a Vertex one in the old Option video days - and I just always wanted to get one. 

Sharon:  Long story short, I got mine because he had one. There was an option to maybe get an SC, but I didn’t want to have the left-hand-drive (LHD) version of his car. I didn’t want it to be him driving his cool Soarer, and I have the LHD version, so I found this one. Probably, if he drove a Z or 240, I would have gotten a Z or a 240. 

Is it harder to find parts for the Soarer? 

Lyron:  The funny thing is the suspension is the same as the SC or Supra, so suspension-wise, it’s easy to get parts. It’s just about getting the right coil overs, the right spring rate, and everything. Other than that, it’s a turbo engine, so that’s all you need. This is the original engine, a stock twin turbo. They’re upgraded, but that’s all you need. The car just has a lot of body roll, so you have to figure out how to get rid of that. It’s the same thing as driving a GTO or any big four-door car. They like to float. They don’t like to be snappy. They’re not like Zs. They don’t transition quickly. 

How long did it take to dial that in and figure out the combination? 

Lyron:  Probably when I started driving again in 2019. Because when I stopped in 2011, I still had the coil overs that came on the car. They were beat and leaking all over the place, so I didn’t really develop anything in those first two years. The only thing I did was cut knuckles and that’s a big thing. You need cut knuckles in these cars. The stock angle is horrible. Once you get cut knuckles, you can just live on them forever. You don’t need a big angle kit. To be fair, no one really makes a good angle kit for this car besides Wisefab and that’s a lot of money. 

Is Sharon’s car a ‘copy-paste’ setup? 

Sharon:  There’s a little bit of difference and they drive completely differently. I still try to keep as much interior as I can, so maybe it’s a sound thing. 

Lyron:  She has 20k springs all the way around. I have - I think - 22 in the front and 24 in the rear or 26 in the rear, but I also tow a huge trailer with it. 

How did you transition into traveling so much? 

Sharon:  The first event I ever tried drifting was a clinic in Virginia and I teamed up with a girl who was teaching it. That was where I learned how to do donuts, and transitions, and everything. We didn’t drive Club Loose until my second year. Until I had active seat time. That track can be intimidating for a beginner, and they don’t utilize the Kart track to give new drivers seat time, so I think he strategically kept me away from Club Loose at first. 

Lyron:  Yeah, for people that learn in parking lots, it’s a completely different animal once you come here because you don’t have that run off like you do in a parking lot. In a parking lot, you can just be like, ‘Alright, I didn’t make this turn. I can just go through the cones and continue.’ Here, if you go off track, it could be - you know - it can destroy everything. 

Sharon:  So, I think he wanted me to get my base skills down before coming here. 

Lyron:  When I started in the car shows, my first car show was in New Hampshire, so I’ve always been traveling. I don’t like to stay in the area, because even car show people stay in their state. You know, they go in their two-three state window, and they don’t go that far. People don’t like to drive. 

What track would you say is the perfect ‘teacher track’ that builds you up with a solid foundation? 

Lyron:  That’s hard to say. Currently, I feel like Driven Luck in Alabama (see DRIFTEM feature on Driven Luck Circuit) is a good starting track because the pavement is consistent. Even though there isn’t runoff, it’s a road course, and it’s not a parking lot. 

Sharon:  We were saying it’s like a mini-ETown. ETown would be top tier if the pavement was consistent, but it’s hit or miss. I want to say another good learning track is Lanier in Georgia, because it can be fast and it’s got a bank, so it’s really what you make of it. 

What track has been your favorite? 

Lyron:  NCCAR. It’s the track that RTR tests on in North Carolina, so it’s not technically open to the public. The track is for vehicle development, so Ford, BMW, Lexus, etc. goes there to develop their cars. No tight corners. Everything just flows so well. It’s high-speed, but it’s not a scary track. Unlike most tracks, where you enter the track, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. There, you just enter, and it’s perfect. It’s just fine. 

What would be the dream track or location in the world you’d want to go? 

Lyron:  I want to go to Canada. 

Sharon:  I’ve always wanted to drive Ebisu. We went to Japan, but at that time, I wasn’t driving yet and didn’t know you could do the whole rent a car and drive. And Ireland. I would love to drive Mondello.  The difficult part is we would need to do two cars. 

On the topic of sharing this passion together, it’s what a lot of guys in the community talk about wanting. What’s your take on that? 

Sharon:  I say it all the time, I don’t know what we would do if we didn’t drift.

Lyron:  We’d still be into cars. We might just do car shows, or mod cars and go to Cars and Coffee. We used to do Cars and Coffee a lot with our cars before she started drifting, but we fell out of that. When I first got my car, I was doing rallies with exotics like Lambos and Ferraris, because technically, it was an exotic at that point. No one else had EM.

“We were both into cars before we got together, but it would be a different thing. I don’t think we would be Stance people, and we’d never be takeover people.”

What are the pros and cons of sharing this hobby with your significant other? 

Sharon:  I would say a pro - at least with our cars – is being able to share parts. For example, when I was at a Drift Kitchen event, my power steering went. He was able to pull the part off his car and put it into my car so I could finish the event. Cons are that you have to know when to not take things personally in the garage, and also being a female learning. 

Lyron:  When we changed her master cylinder, I was doing something on my car too, so I was basically having to do both at the same time. It’s a lot for your brain to process. Working on multiple cars at the same time.  

Sharon:  It’s also very expensive. With two of literally everything, it’s double. Although there was a time when I was learning and didn’t burn as much tire, I’m starting to burn more, and that’s becoming an expense. The bumper budget has been out of control on my end. So, the price of everything is doubled. 

Lyron:  That’s for anyone. Money is always an issue. It might be more for us, but I can’t really say, because our cars are different. Say you have a Z, and you want a door for your Z, and it’s so cheap. For these cars, it’s not as easy to do, because we can get SC doors, but we have to get a certain year to match up with the wire harness unless we just want to take the wire harness out of our doors. And, my car is older, but it’s a luxury model compared to hers, so my wire harness in certain spots is not the same as hers. 

Sharon:  It definitely has more pros than cons. I recommend it to everybody and tell everybody when I meet their girlfriends or significant others to let them drive. Let them get in your car once and go at it, if they want to. 

Changing gears to Drift Week. That’s another ‘pie-in-the-sky’ type thing for a lot of people. How did you guys decide to do it? 

Sharon:  Since we started driving, we always thought if that’s something that popped up, we should do it. We already do it on our own anyway. 

Lyron:  Yeah, we drove to Memphis two years in a row. That’s a 16-hour drive from our house pulling trailers. 

Sharon:  …and if they can do it, why can’t we? It’s another thing that is very expensive and is double the cost when you have a significant other. It’s not just one entry fee and your free copilot, its two fees to do it 

Lyron:  Two entry fees, finding places to stay, etc. We brought all our tires with us, so we brought 46 tires, and used [I think] 32 of them. 

Sharon:  We could have cleared out tires easily at the track, but you had to budget yourself. I have this many tires and I can use this many at this track and this many at that track. 

Lyron:  Yeah, there was another couple on Drift Week, and they used 30 tires in the first three days. They were going nonstop. 

Sharon:  Also, the fact that you’re driving your car so far. You have to pace yourself start-to-finish. We started in New Jersey and ended in New Jersey. Some people trailered their car to the first spot, left their trailers, did Drift Week, and trailered their car back home. 

Being in the scene for so long, how do you feel about the progression of drifting and the trajectory it’s on? 

Lyron:   I feel like it’s progressed in a good way, given I took an eight-year break, missing the prime of drifting. If you really think about it, from 2011 to 2019 was when a lot of people started to really get into it. It was harder back then, and no one was really teaching you. At least now you have clinics and people to help you out with car setup. You can go online and figure out the best setup. That’s the biggest part. The ease of information. I don’t feel like it’s going in a bad direction at all. I feel like it’s progressed in a good way. 

You have a long history of how you got to this point. What’s the next step? 

Sharon:  One thing I want to do personally is more comps. I would like to get more confident in myself in comps. I feel like that’s what limits me. I don’t have the confidence for it. And, as I talk to other females that do this, it seems to be like that across the board. The confidence aspect - you get in the car, and you know what you’re doing, but in your mind, you think you can’t drive. Trackwise, I’d love to go to New Mexico for the No Coast bash (see DRIFTEM feature No Coast. No Problem.). That’s big on my events ‘to do’. 

Lyron:  Well, I don’t plan to ever go in FD or any of those crazy things, because I just don’t see ever building a $200,000 car, but I’d probably like do small comps. The biggest thing is we don’t mind our cars a little bit beat up, but we don’t want people just slamming into them because it costs more to repair this car compared to someone who has a Z.  

Sharon:  We go places, and we drive with people and they’re like, we’re going to door you, but we say we’re not going to run together if you go into my door, and they won’t. They’re respectful, but that’s what I mean with the confidence aspect. I need to trust myself to drive with others and I need to trust others to drive with me. 

Lyron:   Going back to your question about where drifting is going. I feel like the bash mentality is bad for drifting. I understand that its drifting and stuff happens, but you’re specifically going out to smash into someone’s door and it doesn’t make sense.  

Sharon:  Feeding off that, we’ve seen a lot of tracks elsewhere that are putting limitations on the types of cars. I don’t know if limitation is the right word, but it needs to all be one color and it needs to have all its body panels. They want you to be proud of your car when you’re out there driving, because they feel if you’re proud of how your car looks, you’ll drive in that manner.  

Lyron:  If you think about it, that’s how drifting started. It was about style. It wasn’t just about how hard you can go and how messed up your car can be. It was about how your car looks. Event hosts want pictures of nice cars, so people want to come. Not a tin can driving down the track. In Ireland, it’s a whole invitational, and you send them photos of your car to be able to drive. If you don’t show up in that car, you’re not allowed to drive. 

Sharon:  I think that’s what they’re doing now with US Drift. You submit a picture of your car to drive. Drift Indy did the same thing. They take pride in what they bring there. 

Lyron:  Also, Knuckle Up in Texas. You can’t go to their tracks without having a nice car. Not to say your bumper can’t come off during the event, but it’s a car show. It’s basically Final Bout for every one of their events. It’s just the nicest cars you can possibly build, drive, and kill it all day. Media is your best friend. Give them something good to take a picture of.