Tengku Djan

Round 2 falls on Sunday, 28th June at A Famosa Resort Melaka. I qualified 2nd and finished 1st runner up in Round 1 while Tat Wei qualified 1st and finished in top position, giving him maximum points entering Round 2. He’ll be the man to beat this weekend as points gap between us is 17 points. Unfortunate for Ivan as he had LSD issues throughout the weekend and couldn’t make it pass the Best 16 losing out to Kevin from Team Toyo Drift.

The scoring system for StarDrift is quite unique where championship points are given out based on qualifying results too. This makes it way harder and consistency is key to staying on top. Whatever it is, Bridgestone Drift Team is dominating the top 2 spots.

Championship Standing After Round 1

1st Tan Tat Wei – 80 points

2nd Tengku Djan – 63 points

13th Ivan Lau – 4 points

Hi everyone,

I’m trying out something new here with the guys at Zerotohundred.com. This will be my first ever “Product Review” which will be featured on ZTH pretty soon. As some of you would know, I am a Vehicle Dynamics Engineer by profession and spent most of my working life benchmarking, testing & developing many different cars. So I guess it’s time I share some of my experience with the readers.

Don’t forget to checkout www.zerotohundred.com

Today is my last chance to make something of it!

The car felt good throughout the morning practice session. I didn’t waste time and managed to get about 9 laps. Much easier to drive now without having to worry about the gearbox.

Asuka had her job cut out, fine tuning the initiation point and making sure I’m about 1 meter off the first clip. It’s really important to really get the tail hanging out as far as it can go, heading towards the outer clip, right at the initiation point. The guys called it “Kakkin”. The infield is pretty straight forward. The impact comes from entry to the 1st corner.

Again, driver introduction first before we started qualifying session. I was calm and relaxed today. The car is working fine, and I’m relatively confident with my lines. I’m in group C which gave me time to hang about and watch qualifying. My turn was coming up and based on the overall performance today, I needed a minimum of 99.9 to qualify.

My first run was not spectacular. I was a bit nervous to begin with, so i decided to take it easy. No point screwing up my first run as it would kill my confidence for the next 2. My points was not announced so I guessed it would be below 99 points.

I pushed harder on the 2nd run, with better and earlier initiation into the first corner. Got a clean run but Asuka said that initiation had to be quicker, faster and more angle. 99 points.

So 3rd and final run. It’s all or nothing. This time I flicked it, clutched kicked and a dab of handbrake to really get it hanging. I kept it together into turn 1 and made sure throttle application was smooth throughout the course. At the finish line I was thinking to myself, this might be a good run.

Shan came running to the car at pit area. I just kept my finger crossed hoping for the best. She looked at me, smiled and said “99.5 points! goodwork!”

I was like “OH MY GOD, there goes my chances of qualifying”. Top 10 qualifiers were a 100 points each, 11th – 16th position 99.9 points. I finished in 25th position. Drifters like Tanaka & Yoshioka too didn’t qualify for both days. Kumakubo, Saturday’s champion, didn’t qualify for Sunday. This shows the level of performance these boys executed during qualifying.

Nevertheless, I am happy to be here, competing with the best, learning and improving all the time. The experience is priceless.

I would like to thank all parties involved in making this happen for Malaysia. D1 Grand Prix Malaysia, Bridgestone Malaysia, NISMO, Garage SIFT, Shan who has been supporting me since day 1 and everyone else who believe I can do it. Thanks for the support. We’ll get them next time.

With qualifying over, I had no hope in making the Best 16 with only 95 points. The competition was tough and the performance between the top guys almost identical. Seriously, there’s not much difference between their runs.

Ukita-san & Nishino-san (Quartermile mechs) got down to changing the gearbox in preparation for tomorrow. The gate closes at 8pm sharp and no one was allowed to continue working after. It took them 1hr 30mins to complete the swap. The final drive was changed to a 4.3 as the gear ratios were longer compared to the HKS unit. No opportunity to test though, so we’ll just have to wait till practice tomorrow morning.

We took a stroll down the mall area to check out the merchandise booths. One thing that caught my eye was the “D1Grand Prix” arcade gaming booth. They have just release an arcade version of the D1GP game. I didn’t get a chance to try it, but it looked pretty cool. And it should hit Malaysia soon. Sungai Wang maybe?

By 3pm we made our way down to the spotter area to watch the Best 16 competition. I met Genko-san, Chairman of DG-5 and spotter for Immamura. He was spotter for Ueo-san last year when he was driving for Team MOVE. Genko-san is probably the most respected spotter in the drifting industry and has directed many teams & drivers to winning competitions & championships. Kazama was one of them. Asuka was trained by Genko-san.

They were grouping round a table, busy deliberating among themselves (in Japanese) , moving stones & coins as markers on the Best 16 chart. I didn’t have a clue what they were doing at first, but according to Asuka, they were predicting who will be moving up the ladder and thus strategizing on how their drivers had to perform to stay competitive.

The competition was intense, and battles mind blowing. I’ve got to say that the Japanese drivers still have the edge over the rest of the world. One big lesson learnt is that the spotter is a key element in drifting. To be competitive at this level, the spotter plays a key role in elevating the drivers performance. Apparently for some drivers (no names mentioned), the spotters tell them exactly what to do throughout a run. From point of initiation, method of initiation etc. All they do is wait for instructions!

The winner of the day was Kumakubo, after a hard battle and 2 sudden deaths against Suenaga in the Amemiya RX7. It was so difficult to identify who had the advantage, but for sure, that RX7 had massive angle on entry to the 1st corner. Nothing could beat it.

Free practice started at 9am sharp. Like yesterday, we were split to 3 groups, 30mins each. Thats like maybe 7-8 laps for each car. Just as I was getting warmed up, practice session is over!

Before I carry on, I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to Asuka Ueo for being my spotter for the weekend. We met during D1 World Series 2006 and she helped me improve my drifting performance that year which resulted in a win against JR. She is Katsuhiro Ueo’s wife.

Asuka really helped me out with my lines & initiation especially at the entry point to the first corner. I was struggling with a problematic car, limited practice and at the same time, trying to absorb the whole D1 atmosphere. She was very specific with her instructions which helped me catch up for lost time.

The car on the other hand, didn’t feel good at all. It was no different from yesterday. 3rd gear kept popping out after the 2nd hump, right at the point of initiation. I tried a few techniques but couldn’t keep my lines and entry angle consistent. This really put me off and i lacked confidence to perform for qualifying. I ended up having to take off the gear knob to reduce the chances of it popping out of gear even on acceleration!

We had to be on standby for the opening ceremony at 11am. It started off with a driver introduction then the national anthem was played, the usual stuff. Now qualifying starts.

I screwed up both my first and 2nd runs. The 3rd run was my last hope in getting some decent points (1st run 0, 2nd run 70). Already desperate, I decided to initiate using the handbrake. I would then have to try and re-engage 3rd gear. Instead, i got 5th. I scored a miserable 95 points.

We had to be at the track by 10am. The event area is simply awesome. Contractors were busy setting up the grandstands, the concrete barriers were arranged in place and huge sacks of sand were placed behind the barriers to make sure safety is maintained in case of an accident.

We were told tickets were sold out for the 2 day event. They are expecting 12,000 spectators per day. Awesome. Tickets not cheap too. After conversion, it’s about RM250.00 a pop.

The Quartermile crew arrived shortly after 10am, and we started unloading the car and equipment while other teams arrived throughout the morning.

Practice started in the later part of the afternoon. Practice was supposed to start late morning but the contractors were not done with the course setup and props, so practice was delayed and cut down to 30mins per group.

All in all, I got only 15mins worth of practice time on friday due to a faulty gearbox. The track was bumpy on the straight and 3rd gear kept popping out just before initiating point which made it super difficult to drive unless I steered with 1 hand and the other holding the gear stick. So we decided to make a swap with the spare HKS dogbox BUT…… as they were connecting the propshaft, they realized it didnt fit! The spare box was a newer variant and required the NISMO output shaft. We were also out of luck as no one had a spare unit available.

So we had to for go the last 15mins of practice and re-fitted the old box for saturday. Top Secret had a OS Giken close ratio box available, but we could only collect it on Saturday morning and ready for Sunday’s competition.

As a team, we decided to use Saturday as additional practice time in preparation for Sunday.