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Written by:
Bill Wood
RACER Magazine http://www.racer.com
RACER Magazine http://www.racer.com
08/18/2008 - 12:02 PM
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Riandy Helena is a promoter/driver/car importer. The VIPs watching left wanting to see more. (Ivan Mendez photo) » More Photos
First of all, every good story starts with a premise. It might be: “Four score and seven years ago…” Or, “When in the course of human events…” Or, “have you heard the one about the frog in a box…”
Before we get to the premise of this story, lets deal with a few givens. The Puerto Rico Drifting Association not only parties infectiously – they even travel with their own DJ! – but they party 25/8. Still, Jose, Carlos, Raan, Rene, Luis, Jose, Juan and the rest find all the time they need to drive effectively, prepare passionately and do it all with the determination of a heart wanting it’s next beat.
The Club Dominicana de Corredores de Drift, or CDCD (The Club of Dominican Drift Drivers) is no different and may have found time to hang with the PRDA at all the parties if they weren’t the host of last weekend’s La Batalla, a drift battle between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. There’s something about detail that impresses you to keep your mind clear when thousands hang on your every word or decision. In short, they stopped partying at 2am when the PRDA was just shifting gears. Did I mention the PRDA travels with its own DJ and when the mood strikes them at the racetrack they’ll stop, do a little salsa, then drift on?
And here’s another given. Last weekend’s show in Santo Domingo was choreographed by Formula Drift driver Caspar Canul. The first practice session I saw last Thursday was near embarrassing. Maybe three or four of the 14 drivers assembled for La Batalla could negotiate the course in a drift.
Understand that their grip credentials were lengthy. Raan Rodriguez, for example, once ran in the SPEED World Challenge, the Firehawk Series, and the 24 Hours of Daytona several times – but he did the boneheaded-est thing ever when he took his Silvia S-13 out for a practice spin on Tuesday, literally spun it into the guardrail and almost totaled the car – without a helmet or belts – days before the event. He
Canul made each driver a personal project and not only taught them how to drift, but got them prepared for tandem drifting by Sunday.
Understand, too, that most were experiencing their first tandem, or tsuiso drift on Sunday when the driver immediately in front of them pulled the emergency brake and launched both into a netherworld of smoke and squealing tires and fans.
Whatever Caspar told them he should bottle and sell. At Long Beach this year, I saw the same driver hit the same wall after the same mistake three different times, only to emerge from the steaming hulk of debris laughing. Take a Caspar class, dude!
Riandy Helena (Ivan Mendez photo) » More Photos
La Batalla is the passionate dream of Riandy Helena, a 25-year-old driver/promoter who knows more about selling tickets and dreams than 90 percent of his counterparts here in the U.S. For example, La Batalla was sponsored by “Red Bull International, Trident, Subaru International, VP Racing Fuels, Presidente Beer and Red Fresh Market,” a popular Beverly Hills style restaurant in Santo Domingo. Not bad for a first event.
And here’s the key to Riandy: he knows how to sell tickets to individuals. Most promoters might know how to put on an event but have never sold a ticket and wouldn’t know how to get it into the customer’s hand. Riandy, with the help of a Red Bull Austrian World War II Pinzgauer troop transport that had been converted into a DJ wagon, put on a police-escorted parade Friday night through several sections of Santo Domingo, “coincidently” passing all the hot night spots where the drift cars stopped, lined up behind the six-wheeled Pinzgauer, and attracted attention with their gleam and the throbbing music from the Red Bull DJ. In nearly every case, the sound system from the Pinzgauer overwhelmed the club’s system nearby.
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