Spoon Sports

HT: There are several other drifters at the driving school you work at. Who got into drifting first?
TM: As far as the school, I think I was one of the first guys to get into drifting. It fell into my lap with Yokohama. All the drivers at the track like it, but they weren't very accepting of it at first. Right now, there are a lot of instructors that are trying to get into it and asking a lot of questions. I'm kind of the brain at the school about drifting, but I was the skeptical about drifting back in the day, too. I remember when Alex Pfeiffer worked at Jim Russell back in 1998 or so, he was a mechanic and I was an instructor. He showed me a video of some underground drifting in Hawaii and I was like, "What the hell are you guys doing?" That was way back in the day when it wasn't even a competitive motorsport like it is now. It was true underground video of guys having fun and that's all it was. He was the person who first introduced it to me. It's ironic that now I'm driving his old car.

HT: Do the other instructors ever try and get into a little competition while at work?
TM: Not as often as you would think. On G4 [TV], they joke that we're always out there on the track drifting, but actually we're not. The instructors always try and drift as often as we can when we're doing hot laps or autocross, but you'd think I'm drifting a lot more than I actually am. I've literally practiced on the Sonoma track only once prior to the actual competition. RS*R came out about 2 months before the competition and we had about 2 hours on the track, and that's the only official drifting practice I've had there even though I'm at the track every day.

HT: You also drive an RSX-S in the U.S. Touring Car series for Opak and Spoon Sports. How hard is it to jump back and forth between grip and drift events?
TM: I thought when I started doing more drifting that it would affect the racing, but when you get back into the car, you know exactly what to do. As of now, I haven't run into any problems. I think once you get into the car and your muscle-memory kicks in, everything goes smoothly.

HT: How similar or different are the cars you drive in competition, the S2000 and the RSX?
TM: Not very similar at all, they're a totally different feel. The S2000 is more like a kart, while the RSX takes a lot more effort to drive. I've driven plenty of S2000's on the track; the RS*R one is totally different because it has gobs of power for an S2000. The RSX I drive for Spoon is naturally aspirated, right-hand drive, and FWD, although my RSX is actually amazingly easy to drive for a FWD car.

HT: How did you get into that car? I hear it involves drifting.TM: I started talking to the Opak guys for drifting last year. Gary McKinney introduced me to them last year actually about the same time I started talking to RS*R. Spoon wanted to build a car for drifting, and ironically, the other driver up for that ride was Alex. Spoon has a rich racing history and they found out I had done a bunch of racing, so the original plan was to have me drift an S2000 and race the RSX for them, but the drift car never got finished so I just stayed with them for racing. With Spoon, there's a lot of opportunity to grow into other forms of racing down the line outside of the USTCC stuff because they are involved Grand Am and so many other forms of racing. We'll see where that goes.