Life...Sideways

Brian asked me what I was planning on importing and when I said that I was trying to get a Subaru Impreza STi Type RA he said "Oh ok cool, I thought u were trying to get into drifting lol?"  Well, I was going to answer with another comment but it just became too long so I'll answer in a post instead.

I do want to get more into drifting but there are several reasons why I'm going to go with the Subaru.  I've been a Subaru guy since 1998 when I ordered my first Impreza.  Until last year I've not driven anything daily other than an Impreza of one year or another.  I've owned 4 of them in fact.  I've also attended a rally school in Ireland where I was invited to participate in a sponsorship program, but since I didn't have an EU residence visa I couldn't actually join. -_-  The school taught me several things but one of the things I took away was that a professional rally driver of 30+ years thought that my driving was good.  That means that I can do something with it if I can just get the opportunity.  Just drifting probably isn't going to get me there in this country, but if I can get into Gymkhana and Rallying there are more opportunities.

Here in Sweden there isn't a lot going on in the drifting community.  It mostly consists of a few semi-professional groups that do exhibitions and such and then your average teenager who has had their license for a year just messing around.  There's really no middle ground so there isn't much of a community.  Also the police and the laws are much more severe than in other places, probably quite similar to Japan in a lot of ways I would imagine.  For example 21kph over the speed limit is an automatic license suspension, under that and they usually don't bother you.  So the grey areas are wide but narrow which makes it difficult to do anything in that zone.  A friend has an S13 and had to take off his carbon GT style wing.  It went through the vehicle inspection just fine but the police didn't like it so he had to remove it.  It wasn't huge or anything, he just ran into a bad cop I guess.  So those sorts of things make it difficult to do things like street drifting.  Combine that with the fact that the roads are typically either designed in a boring way drifting wise, or where they are fun, they are very narrow with granite curbs and it makes street drifting an even riskier thing than normal.  To my knowledge the concept of a drift day doesn't exist at the few race tracks here either.  They are also huge fans of speed bumps here in Sweden.  There's two types, one that goes all the way across the road that is about a meter wide and usually about 25cm tall.  The other type looks more like some sort of leftover from the world wars.  They are like a pyramid with the top cut off and are just a little bit narrower than the width of most cars.  Additionally they have these same sort of obstacles on lots of the roundabout's to slow people down before entering.  The lowered Audi barely makes it over without scraping or getting hung up.  There is no way a properly setup drift car would make it over them.  It'd wind up looking like a teeter-totter.

So I figure with the Impreza I could get into doing Gymkhana at the very least and maybe that could lead back into rallying.  I'm not sure if there are events here already but if not, it would be rather simple to start one.  Just need an empty parking lot and lots of cones.  There are lots of rally events in Sweden and even an FIA World Rally event in February. 

Mostly, right now I just want a car that I can have fun with year round and is something different from all the cookie cutter Saab's and Volvo's here.  I know Subaru's inside and out and I have lots of option parts that I can install right away so it just makes sense.

I've got a bunch of things that I'm doing as far as my finances are concerned, consolidating things, cutting corners and my base income should be doubling by the end of the first quarter 2012.  So the overall plan is to get the RA and at least have a car that I can enjoy, work on saving for a house & garage and then probably import a JZX100 that I can dedicate for drifting.

Check out this video of a guy I know doing Gymkhana in his Type RA.