The weekend came and went in such a blur but you better believe it was a good one for the entire team at Slide Motorsport!
First of all a huge thanks to all the fans and supporters who came out and supported the team, especially those of you who got the chance to grab some of the new merchandise (sorry for those of you who missed out, we didn’t realise it would be closed pits until it was halfway through the day Saturday! But don’t worry we’ll have even better deals on at Slidefest and it will all be up for sale on the website this week.)
Also whilst we are on the subject of gratitude we’d like to thank Dave Egan and all the team at Zigen who once again put on another amazing event, and all the staff from Teeside who helped to keep the event running smooth and safely and making sure this year our cars went the correct way around the track!
So anyway on to the driving…. We’ll start with a massive congratulations to our Stu Jones who earned his BDC license and finally got that 4th slot in the slide pits filled again, it’s been lonely since Ben retired! He was smashing his way through qualifying and didn’t let any nerves show as he made it to 20th spot, and got through before loosing out in what was a tricky battle against Neil Bamford where they ended up going one more time. Make sure you keep an eye out for him going #FULLSTU up at Driftland next month!
Adam Simmons had a much better weekend than he did at round one, which was well deserved after all the stress and money he had to last minute endure through to even get to the event, after his engine gave up on the dyno two days before. Him and Jason had to pull some all nighters at the garage to get the new head on the engine and it all came together for him as he nailed his first qualifying run in the 80’s! He went on to face Michael Marshall in his first battle of the day, which he absolutely smashed before going on to face the team Slide DK Jason Clark in the top 16, more on this soon!
Matt Stevenson had a big weekend after the shortest retirement from drifting ever taking the freshly wrapped DKM BMW E92 on it’s first outing and ran a clean 2nd try at qualifying grabbing his top 24 spot. His first battle would be against Damien Wilkinson who had earned his way through from Pro-Am the day before, but Matt’s veteran experience proved too much for him as he clinched his own top 16 Battle. In said top 16 battle Matt would face off against the nicest man in drifting Matthew Denham, who might not know how many cams go in his LS but he sure can drive and after a close fought run the judges would vote in favour of Denham.
Then last but by means it’s time to talk about the weekend topper and Slide Motorsport team DK Jason Clark! Jason began the weekend in flying form on the Saturday by chasing down Duane McKeever during practice, and just spending all of Sunday morning smashing the line in warm up, putting it all together during his first qualifying run getting a 91.3 and finishing qualifying overall in 4th position! This meant he would jump straight into the Top 16 battles for the second round in a row, going against Adam and clinching his next victory in the Pro division. He would then have arguably his biggest challenge yet going against Paul Smokey Smith who was on fire all day, pushing it as far as a one more time, where sadly due to a lack of changing tyres for the OMT he didn’t have the grip he needed to stick with him. Jason took the loss but now sits at 6th in the overall rankings so congrats to DK keeping hold off his title.
So there you have it, a recap of the events of round two, thanks to all our sponsors, pit crew and media for helping or out and make sure you head over to the YouTube channel this Friday for when the vlog releases!
