Crick Filippi – Formula Drift Rookie Hits the Road

Crick Filippi earned his Formula Drift PRO2 license last year in a qualifying series here in the San Francisco Bay area.  Since then, Crick has been working hard to find the financing necessary to set off on his dream of becoming a professional driver in the world’s most competitive drift series.  Getting the license is hard enough.  Getting a professional program put together on a shoestring, blue collar budget is an entirely different challenge altogether.  Unfortunately, Crick wasn’t able to make the first PRO2 event of the season, on the far side of the country in Orlando, from where Crick resides.  But Seattle seemed manageable.  The one thing keeping him from his goal now was a car.

Crick drifts a lot.  Like, every week a lot.  Over the past couple years Cricks primary bullet has taken a pretty harsh beating.  The Nissan S13 coupe he was tossing around the bull ring each week was slowly being whittled away at both ends from repeated encounters with not only the concrete barricades of the Sonoma Drift paddock course, but other competitors, as well.  It happens.  In amateur drifting, it happens more often than not.  A few options were discussed over the year, but Crick and his team finally decided to stick with the chassis he was already comfortable with – The Nissan S13 Coupe.

With just a week now before Seattle, the team made some magic happen and had the new build completed just six days after it started – with Crick doing most of the fab work (Crick is a fabricator by trade – and a damn good one), including a full roll cage.  The car was together and in need of a tune, so the folks up at Portland Speed Industries were contacted and an appointment set for 7am the next morning.  That early appointment necessitated an all night drive direct from Cricks garage in Vallejo, California, 625 miles north to Portland where the dyno at PSI anxiously awaited it’s next customer (as machines do).

Not wanting to miss the action, I jumped in the My Life at Speed custom media wagon and also made the long overnight journey to Portland.

I met up with Crick, a little later than anticipated, but still on time since the PSI dyno was having some trouble communicating with Cricks car.  That gave me the chance to get a few photos of the car, and for Crick and the team to clear a handful of items off the still remaining punch list.   Is a race car ever really finished?  A discussion for another time…

The video is just a quick look at some of what was happening while at PSI.

This is the first of several installments we’ll have with Crick as we follow his journey from Working Class drift warrior to his place in the Formula Drift lineup.  So stay tuned!