Formula Drift is the most adrenaline-packed racing circuit you’ve never heard of, and racer Trenton Beechum arrives to make it your new obsession.
Burning Rubber with Trenton Beechum
Before we get into the mechanics – as it were – of Trenton Beechum, you might need a quick primer on his realm.
Consider that a typical Formula Drift race is over in 45 seconds, and an entire heat completes in under two minutes. Yet fans and drivers alike continually spend hours at the track, soaking in the heat and breathing in the burning rubber, all for the chance to experience the nonstop adrenaline that makes drift racing unique in the world of motorsports.
“It’s more exciting than drag racing or circuit racing or anything because [you feel the] adrenaline the whole time,” says Trenton Beechum, the sport’s newest pro racer.
“The runs aren’t very long, but we’re going 100 miles an hour, neck and neck, with like a thousand horsepower cars. So, it’s pretty crazy. It’s a good adrenaline rush.”
Beechum, 29, has been drifting — literally, not metaphorically — since 2014. In 2015, he was the TopDrift Pro-Am Champion, and in 2019, he was the Formula Drift Pro2 Champion. He got his pro card to move up to the big leagues just before COVID-19 hit, and finally in 2022 has been able to take on the sport’s biggest names in his bid to establish himself as one of drifting’s top stars.
Going from the top of the track to the new kid on the block hasn’t been an easy transition — it’s hard to give up nonstop winning and go back to paying your dues — but Beechum has seen the sport’s fan base grow, and he’s planning to be there when it blows up and takes on NASCAR and Formula 1 in a battle to be America’s favorite motorsport.
“It started off as fun, and it still is really fun because now I’m going like seven times faster and competing with the world’s best people,” Beechum says.
As a kid, Beechum watched drifters like Matt Field and James Deane, two of the sport’s most famous racers, and now, they’re his friends — and his competition. But taking on his childhood heroes hasn’t been too much of a struggle.
“I like watching them race. I’m not crazy, but I’d rather be out there driving,” laughs Beechum, who counts Penthouse as a sponsor.
Part of the rush of drifting comes from having to keep a speeding half-ton hunk of steel from spinning out of control while driving mere inches away from your competitor. You know that feeling you get when you start hydroplaning during a storm? That’s the same feeling drift racers experience every time they get behind the wheel of their car.
It goes like this: Each heat in drift racing involves only two cars, a lead car and a follow car, and two laps. The lead car takes off and has a certain set of marks to hit around the track’s outer zone. When the lead car approaches a turn, the goal is to oversteer and kick the clutch, forcing the wheels to lock up and the tires to lose traction with the asphalt. Then, instead of driving around the curve, the car drifts, the tires shredding as they slide across the pavement. As the car comes out of the curve, the driver has to quickly straighten and regain traction to pull out of the drift.
If that’s not complicated enough, this is all happening while the follow car chases after the lead car, trying to hit every mark and match the lead car’s speed and angle — while essentially tailgating the competition. Then, they switch roles and do it all over again — in less time than it took you to read this explanation.
“It’s very nerve-wracking,” Beechum admits. “I still feel that way today. Getting in the car, sitting on the line, it’s just the most nerve-wracking thing you can do. [I can’t stop thinking] ‘Is the car going to survive? Am I going to crash? How fast are we going to go?’ But then once you get out [on the track], the next 45 seconds you’re just flooring it. You have nothing else to think about except keeping the car floored and as fast as you can go.”
If you watch ride-along videos of drifters, you’ll see so much activity as the drivers hit a turn. They have nanoseconds, at best, to kick the clutch several times, quickly counter-steer against the curve, and then whip the steering wheel in the complete opposite direction to fly into the perfect drift. There’s adrenaline coursing through their bodies from the sheer excitement of it all, but also the very real danger they’re in if they fuck it up. And yet, the best drivers execute that sequence with such style that it looks effortless from the outside, almost graceful.
When Beechum meets traditional racers who’ve decided to give drifting a spin, they’re usually freaking out.
“They’re so used to driving perfect, driving straight, and then they try drifting and they’re like, ‘Holy shit! I can’t do it. My body is telling me this doesn’t feel right,’” he explains. “It takes a different kind of skill.”
To be fair, Beechum says he wasn’t quite cut out for NASCAR, either — though for a slightly different reason.
“I went and tried it out, and I thought that shit was pretty fucking easy,” he says. “You’re just going left.”
He has nothing against traditional racing, though. He gets the appeal of going 200 mph — and getting paid handsomely to do it — but he also doesn’t feel the same connection to it that most fans and racers do. He didn’t grow up with NASCAR. At 15, he wasn’t so much into going fast as going hard, crashing through his neighborhood in a car he wasn’t technically supposed to be driving and seeing just what he was capable of behind the wheel.
More and more, Beechum says, he’s meeting new fans at his races who came over from NASCAR or Formula 1 and expected to feel about drift the way he feels about straight driving. But after seeing a couple heats, he says, they became converts.
“It’s like a drug,” he explains. “Ask anyone who’s ever drifted. I have friends who can’t race anymore, and they’ll be on another drifter’s team just to be around the sport, just to be that close and be a part of it.”
Infectious guy, that Trenton, right? … Obviously there would be an instagram. And obviously you can even find time to watch complete races, even in a forced short video format. Granted, to some of us it looks like trying to get to your girlfriend’s house before her parents get home during any Colorado winter, but these folks are doing it with 1,000 hp engines with nary any nookie at the finish line. That dedication has to count for something. And simply because we like for everyone to feel involved, we cajoled Mr. Trenton Beechum into giving us a clip from the “passenger cam” that we could share. … Better not sneeze during one of these runs. …
