Official on-track activities for this weekend’s IndyCar Long Beach Grand Prix haven’t begun yet, but Long Beach residents could still hear the sound of screeching tires and roaring engines emerging from the 11-turn, 1.9-mile temporary street course this past weekend.
That’s because Formula Drift, the world’s premiere drifting series, had descended upon the track for the first round of its 2019 season.
The event was won by Nissan Silvia S14 driver Aurimas Bakchis, but in our opinion, the real winner was Matt Field. The C6 Corvette driver put in a stellar 99-point qualifying run during Formula Drift and a hugely talented drone pilot was able to capture some of it in a truly beautiful fashion.
The video, which we’ve embedded below, is genuinely one of the coolest pieces of automotive media we’ve seen in recent years. The drone pilot is able to get extremely close to Field’s freshly built Falken Tires-sponsored Chevy as it swings from side to side, slipping and sliding its way around the Long Beach GP track. We’d say this video looks like a video game or movie trailer, but that wouldn’t be giving it enough credit. We can’t recall seeing a movie or video game that looks this cool.
As far as we can tell, the drone pilot responsible for this epic clip is Johnny Schaer. His Instagram is full of similarly shot drone footage of various Formula Drift cars and is definitely worth checking out if you like his video from Long Beach.
Now if only IMSA, NASCAR, Formula 1 and every other race series in the world would use drones to shoot their races in a similar fashion. We never thought we’d say it, but perhaps they could learn a thing or two from fun-loving Formula Drift.
Source: Formula Drift/Johnny Schaer
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Long Beach Grand Prix this week end, Matt will be there. Cool, half hour up the 405 fwy, but I’m going to Las Vegas this weekend.
I was attending the event back when Al Jr. was killing it!
Here’s another Matt Field drift from last year for everyone to enjoy. https://youtu.be/hImzpgShh6M
Think it was posted by GMA back then!