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Drifting
Pretty: Nadine
Toyoda and her girl racers
2006
Schedule
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Formula Drift
Related Issue:
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Women
Web Site www.nadine180.com
or E-Mail
As one of the first woman drifters in the USA,
Nadine Toyoda is focused on setting the bar high
for women in drifting. Her main goals are to become
one of America's Top Drifters, empower other women
to go drifting, and move forward by creating a
strong, respected presence of women in the drifting
industry-which is male dominated…for now.
Birthplace - Arcadia, CA
Age - 26
Nationality - Scottish and Japanese
Foreign Languages - Japanese
Racing Experience - 5 years road race, 5 years
autocross, 3 years drifting
Positions - Director of The Drifting Pretty Program
(Program to assist women in learning how to drift
and race)
2003 - Present
Founder of Team Drifting Pretty (America's first
all-woman competition drifting team)
2004 - Present
Event Planning committee for SoCal240SX.org
(Southern California's 240SX owners club)
2000 - Present
Staff member for Drift Association LLC 2001 -
Present
Objectives
Be a positive role model for aspiring woman
racers
Welcome, encourage and teach woman racers
Reflect & preserve sponsors' values
Be the first woman to place in a major drifting
series
Represent sponsors & women in motorsports in a
professional manner
Accomplishments
Ranked #4 in Top 12 at Drift Showoff, NorCal
(10.2005)
Top 10 of 52 at Drift Day Competition 5, Fontana,
CA (09.2005)
2nd Place at Import Showoff, Nissan Class
(08.2005)
Ranked #20 of 43 at Formula D Chicago (08.2005)
1st Place, Dori Puri Cup, Willow Springs Balcony
(07.2005)
Top 12 (of 28) Drive Fest Advanced Drifting
Competition, Walt James Oval Willow Springs
(07.2005)
2nd Place, Advanced Class, Land Ho Drifting
Competition (05.2005)
Certified Advanced Driver by Drift Association LLC
(04.2005)
Top 16 (of 43) Drift Day Competition (01.2005)
1st Place, Dori Puri Challenge (Woman Drifting
Competition) (09.2004)
Founder of America's first all-woman drifting
competition team, Team Drifting Pretty
(09.2004)
Participant in Yokohama Tire Show Tour (06.2004 -
10.2004)
D1 Grand Prix Media Staff Member (02.2004)
Founder of America's first woman drift training
program, The Drifting Pretty Program (12.2003)
First woman drifter to be sponsored by a tire
company (08.2003)
Serving on Drift Association LLC staff
(2002-current)
Planning Committee for SoCal240SX.org
(2000-current)
2005 Television Features
ESPN2 "Import Racers" Feature Episode, Airing in
September 2005
Speed Channel "Street Tuner Challenge" Feature,
Airing in September 2005
Grip Video, Feature, unreleased
Univision "Primer Impacto" - News feature
(06.2005)
Green Bottle DVD, feature (unreleased)
2005 Media Features
Jtuned.com, author of "Sponsorship Guide,"
(07.2005)
Rim of The World Rally, Drifting Exhibition driver
(05.2005)
The Downtown Gazette, "Women Drifters Take Their
Turns Behind Wheel", Front Page, (04.04.2005)
Jtuned.com, main feature (02.2005)
Import Racer, Quick Release: "Drifting Pretty"
(04.2005)
2004 Television Features
KCAL9 News Segment, "Speed Queen" (02.10.2004)
Pure Drifting DVD, interviewee (02.28.2004)
Spike TV: RIDE with Funkmaster Flex, Interviewee
(06.00.2004)
Country Music Television: Fast & the Furious
Street Racing, Interview (08.28.2004)
KCAL9 on the Town, Drifting Pretty segment
(12.22.2004)
2004 Print Features
Import Racer: With Love from Philly, Author
(10.2004)
Seen Magazine: Drifting Pretty (10.2004)
Import Tuner: Power Page, part 3 of 3 (09.2004)
12Volt Street News (industry
publication)(09.2004)
Import Tuner: Power Page, part 3 of 3 (08.2004)
Paper Magazine: Paperview Nadine Toyoda, page
24
LA Weekly: Cover Story Nadine Toyoda & her Girl
Racers (05.2004)
Import Racer: Drifting Pretty, America's first
all-girl drift crew (04.2004)
San Diego Union Tribune: Brake Dancing (Cover Life
Style Section) (02.2004)
2004 Media Appearances
GT Live: Feature car at ACT booth (12.2004)
HIN San Mateo: Featured Driver autograph session
(10.2004)
HIN Atlanta: Featured Driver autograph session
(08.2004)
HIN Dallas: Featured Driver autograph session
(08.2004)
HIN Boston: Featured Driver autograph session
(07.2004)
HIN Philadelphia: Featured Driver autograph session
(06.2004)
2002-2003 Media Features
The Official 2002 National 240SX Convention DVD,
Car Profile (12.2002)
Import Racer Presents: Drifting Magazine, article,
"Nadine & Benson" (07.2003)
D1 Grand Prix, feature car in Y-Visionary
Publication booth (08.2003)
Import Tuner Magazine, "Power Page - 1989 Nissan
240SX SR20DET" (09.2003)
Source: www.nadine180.com
or E-Mail
Drifting Pretty Nadine
Toyoda and her girl racers
The girl racers love each other’s cars. They
fantasize about them at odd moments, when brushing
their teeth, say, or sleeping, or sitting in class,
or at work. Instead of slumber parties or trips to
the mall, the girls hook up on Saturday nights to
change out a clutch or bleed a brake line. Among
the members of Drifting Pretty, the first-ever
all-girl drift-racing crew in the U.S., there is a
nurse, a mortgage broker, a stuffed-animal
collector, a former cheerleader, a high school
senior, an accountant and a young mother. But
nearly all of them have the same car: the Nissan
240SX. It is not an expensive car. It is not even
necessarily a fast car, or a trendy car, or a car
with lots of sex appeal. But it is a car they have
taken apart and put together on their own. If they
know the way its engine purrs, or roars, or
screams, or the way its body kit shudders as it
glides on smoking wheels just inches from a wall of
death, it is because they have driven it hard. Yes,
it is the car they drive to the grocery and to
visit their boyfriends. But once a month, as if
seized by fits of lunar madness, the girls hit the
track, and 18 humdrum econo-mobiles become badass
racing machines.
On a blazingly bright afternoon, I was in a San
Gabriel parking lot watching the racer girls race.
The lot had been converted into an autocross track
with orange cones marking out the winding lanes.
The girls lined up bumper to bumper in a row of
Nissans to race against the clock. They drove like
banshees. They waved to one another and gave
thumbs-up.
“I want to beat 38 seconds,” said
their leader Nadine Toyoda, who stayed on track the
longest and drove the fastest. “I need to beat
it,” she said.
“But did you see me?” said Sarah
Nakadate. “Nadine was fast, but she better
look out. ’Cause I was right up her
ass.”
I first met Nadine Toyoda at a race event called
the D1 Drift Grand Prix. A bunch of Japanese men
were tearing up the asphalt in souped-up Nissans
and Toyotas. They charged around the oval track,
tires shrieking, making lots of smoke and pummeling
occasionally into plastic barricades. I had never
seen a car “drift” before, except by
accident. But at D1, skidding sideways while taking
turns at high velocities was the whole point. It
was only a matter of time before people started
skidding around curves, shredding their tires, then
competing to see who could do it best. Though
drifting had been going on in Japan for the past 10
years, D1 was only the second international
competition held in the United States. Already
there was a growing rivalry between the Japanese
— who had flown in just for the event —
and the Americans. Hardly any American men —
let alone women — drift on a professional
level. Yet that day I had heard tell of a young
Japanese-American, a girl, who was trying to break
into the scene.
Riding in a car that’s drifting is like
being caught in the final seconds of a high-speed
swerving accident — over and over again. G
force squeezes the air out of your lungs. Your head
knocks against the window and roll cage like a nut
in a can. You fight the urge to stop the car, which
seems to be careening out of control. You fight the
disorientation, the cognitive dissonance that your
car — once an ordinary car meant for boring
commutes to work, a car meant to go forward and
backward and occasionally gently to the right or
left — is hurtling sideways at 100 mph at a
180-degree angle. Drivers get points for angle of
attack, for the amount of smoke output, for the
tire squeal and for the nebulous, highly subjective
quality of “showmanship.”
Nadine Toyoda was the girl who wanted to drift.
She stood by herself at the edge of the track
staring at the Japanese drivers. She was 24 years
old, skinny in jeans and a powder-blue sweater, all
fierce angles and powdery pale skin. Her long light
brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Like
most of the other girls milling about — the
girlfriends, the import models, the car-show women
— she was young and cute. She couldn’t
have weighed more than 100 pounds. But unlike most
of the other girls, Nadine looked determined. She
looked like she was working something out. And
that, I thought, made her beautiful.
Drifting is a guy thing because motorsports in
general is a guy thing. If you are young and a guy
and Asian and into cars, then chances are that you
are into imports. If you are young and Asian and a
girl and if by some off chance you are into cars,
then popular opinion has it that you are only into
it marginally, either as a model or a
girlfriend.
Nadine devoted her teenage years to being a
girlfriend in the street-racing crowd. Honda Civics
and Acura Integras were the cool cars then. It was
the day before the Drifting Pretty autocross event,
and Nadine and I were hanging out at her house in
San Gabriel, flipping through car magazines. When
she was 14, she said, she would ride passenger with
guys. When she was 15, they would drive out to
Ontario on weekends at 11 at night to meet up at
gas stations or parking lots and race on deserted
streets. There were car jackings and shootings.
Then the cops would bust it up and the racers would
take off, all at the same time, taillights fading
into the suburban night. It was scary and illegal
and thrilling as an Akira chase scene and an
accident waiting to happen. “And accidents did
happen. All the time,” she said.
And then, when she was 17, she got pregnant.
Maybe it was becoming a mother that changed things
for her. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
On her left shoulder, Nadine has a tattoo that she
got right after her daughter was born. It is of a
tiger clawing at the air, surrounded by flowers.
“Live life with no regrets,” it says in
Chinese characters. She decided that “street
racing is stupid. It isn’t about racing.
It’s about immature male egos. I can’t
believe I risked my life every time I
went.”
Nadine’s house is a modest one-bedroom
bungalow that she shares with her boyfriend, Benson
Hsu, himself an accomplished drifter. In the corner
of their living room is a floor-to-ceiling,
first-place gold trophy that Benson won last year
at the big national Drift Show-Off competition
where every drifter in the country worth his salt
battles for dominance. The trophy itself is taller
than Nadine, who has yet to win one of her own.
Their house is one of the smallest on the block,
but it has by far the longest driveway — long
enough to fit six cars end to end.
Most guy drifters come out of an automotive
background. Nadine’s parents are landscape
designers — formal Japanese and English
gardens — and there is a bit of the spare Zen
aesthetic to Nadine’s front walkway, save for
the chalk hopscotch squares her now 7-year-old
daughter had added. Nadine’s car was parked
right outside the front door. Just before she got
her driver’s license, her cousin had given her
the gunmetal-gray Nissan as a gift. It had never
been washed. The window tint was bubbly. So it sat
in the driveway for a while, doing zero miles per
hour on the concrete. Then one day while she was in
Little Tokyo, she stopped into a bookstore and saw
in a Japanese auto magazine that her battered
little 240SX was actually one of the most popular
cars to get fixed up in Japan. “This is a good
car,” she thought. “This is a car with
potential.”
I asked her how she got into cars in the first
place, and by way of explanation, Nadine grabbed a
thick glossy magazine saturated in Japanese text,
more of a book, really, that she bought in Little
Tokyo. It was an encyclopedia of all the known
parts one can buy for a Nissan 240SX. “This is
my bible,” she said. “See this? This is
called a coilover. It’s the thing that keeps
your wheels from bouncing-bouncing. Look at all
these cute colors they come in.” We could have
been looking at Prada purses or prom dresses or
nail polish, but instead we were lusting over
bumpers and body kits. And that’s how it
starts. The car lust. The equipment fetish.
“You see all the pretty parts you can put on
the car and go, ‘That’s cute!’”
Nadine’s guy friends would be talking about
which suspension they were going to get —
they’d point to a green or purple one in the
catalog — and Nadine would ask, “Does it
come in pink?”
Like most of the girl racers, Nadine leads a
double life. In one, she is training to be a
certified public accountant. In the other,
she’s a drift dragon, the future empress of a
thousand-girl drift army. Drifting Pretty is the
love child of those two lives. Nadine likes to run
the program as a hybrid between a sorority and a
military boot camp. She started it last Christmas,
and there are 18 active members so far. “I
give them guidelines for behavior because, you
know, girls like to show off and get attention. I
want them to be joining for the right
reasons.” They got points for showing up to
meetings and racing events. If they failed to show,
they got put on probation. The racer in Nadine
liked to haul ass on the oval. But the accountant
in her had a thing for charts and spreadsheets.
“This is serious,” Nadine said.
“This isn’t playing Barbies, it’s
driving.” Every month, they have a track
event. Yet they also have nights when the girls get
glammed up and go clubbing. In addition, they have
had tech nights where they would get hands-on with
power tools (because knowing how your car works
makes you a better driver); a “learning how to
model” day (because people were always asking
to take pictures with them at car shows); a meeting
about how to get out of a speeding ticket (smile,
be positive, act responsible, and if all else
fails, flirt or cry); a go-karting day to practice
steering (because you also steer with your body);
an engine-anatomy day (because Nadine would be
quizzing them at a later date); and a movie night
to watch Initial-D, an anime DVD series about a
young Japanese guy turned drifter (because, well .
. . just because).
That evening at Nadine’s, we sat in her car
in the driveway. It was dark in there, close and
self-contained, a small world. Plus, it smelled
like tropical fruit. She had stiff racing seats
that clenched your body like an iron fist, that had
the brand name Bride plastered all over them, as if
to say “Now we are married! Now we are
one!” The cool things about her car are, in no
particular order: the three-piece mesh Work VS-XX
wheels which are 9 inches wide and 18 inches high
that were special ordered from Japan. The
blind-spot mirror with a puffy flower sticker on
it. The Japanese front bumper, paid for by her
sponsor, Nissan. The ball-locking anti-theft
mechanism that allows her to detach her steering
wheel, the key for which is “really cute”
and which I had mistaken for an air freshener. And
the flowery Hawaiian surfer girl floor mats.
Back when Nadine was sitting passenger a lot
with guy drivers, there was always one girl driver
at the street races. “Her name was Kimbo. She
was this chick in a Civic. And I was like, that is
so cool.” Kimbo would usually lose. But still
people cheered her on. “Go, Kimbo! Go go go!
They were talking about that girl. That one. She
drives. Everyone had respect for her.” Getting
respect was big with Nadine, and when she saw the
drifting scene, she saw her chance. “I’m
gonna be the only one this time,” she
said.
And for a while, she was the only one. And for a
while, that was cool. But it is a delicate balance
between admiration and scrutiny. Nadine began
dreading events. She would pull into the pit, and
time would stop as guys eyed her. “I felt like
I was being watched. I didn’t like the idea of
people hanging on my every move. They see one run
you make and generalize: She spun out, she sucks.
Girls suck.” Loneliness kicked in.
“Man,” she thought, “I want more
girlfriends that love cars. I know there’s
gotta be girls out there because guys love cars and
girls are always with their boyfriends, and it rubs
off on them, just like it did with me.”
Like a wish granted, Nadine started seeing
another girl on the tracks. “Don’t talk
to her, she’s a bitch,” guys warned.
Yoshie Shuyama was 31 years old, aggressive, had a
perpetually stern expression and spoke an abrupt,
halting mix of English and Japanese. She was a
ladies’ autocross champion and, like Nadine,
she looked like she could kick a little ass. She
was competition. Nadine asked Yoshie to be her
driving partner anyway. Each time they got
together, they bemoaned the dearth of female racers
in the import car scene. “We were always
asking each other, ‘Where’s the rest of
the girls? There’s no girls here,’”
said Nadine.
“What about those girls?” said Yoshie,
pointing to a clump of import models.
No, they’re just sitting passenger.
“But we can do something,” Nadine
thought. “We can start something. We can
recruit them.”
A few of the racer girls live in the San Gabriel
Valley. But most of them are spread out through the
vast snake nest of freeways that is Southern
California. There were girls off the 57, off the
405, off the 10 and the 5. At the autocross in the
San Gabriel parking lot that day, the course was
hot and the girls veered through orange cones as
fast as they could, making times just under a
minute. Helmets on, they were unrecognizable save
for their bumper stickers — the name Drifting
Pretty in cursive script plowing through a cloud of
pink petals.
The point of the autocross was for the girls to
learn the racing line. It was just one of many
driving skills that Nadine insisted they practice.
The racing line is the quickest, most efficient way
through a turn. It is where brains and skill and
technique kick in over sheer power, and one of the
great equalizing factors for girls on the track.
You learn the correct way to hold your steering
wheel, the correct way to sit. You learn the
correct way to execute a turn, when to brake, when
to gas because if you don’t you’ll spin
out. “Yoshie’s got 80 horsepower.
I’ve got 205 horsepower. But she kicks my ass
on the track because her racing line is so good I
can’t pass her.” This is what Nadine
teaches the girls. And, in a manner of speaking, to
me.
The world in the window blurred as we took off
— cones trees cones white lines chalk sprays
of asphalt smoke a man waving a flag sunlight
streaming glinting sliding blinding alive! The
track seeming to tilt as we squealed around turns.
We weaved through slaloms, sped through
straightaways. She had her shoes off, one small
sock-foot pumping the gas pedal. Nothing else
mattered except the road, not time, not place, not
the thing you forgot to do last night. And then,
too fast, it was over. She was a talented driver,
even if your only measurement was not having
crashed and died.
At the end of the day, Nadine and Yoshie sat
side by side at the edge of the track, knees pulled
up. They had both taken down their ponytails. A
wind had kicked up and it blew their hair in wispy
tendrils around their shoulders in a way that made
me think of the melancholy heroines in manga
fantasy novels. When you got right down to it, all
they’d done was drive in circles for hours and
wind up in the exact same place.
Or had they?
I tried to imagine what it would be like for
them without the drift, without the races and the
short times, the camaraderie of girls. Would it
mean a life of number crunching, where an engine
was nothing more than the sum of its parts? I tried
to imagine Nadine 10, 15 years from now. I
couldn’t picture her living the slow life for
long without doing something fast and new. The car
is an escape in more ways than one.
Drag is the science of straight lines, a vector
shot from point A to point B. But drifting is the
physics of the curve. There was something romantic
about that, I thought. Drift was about aggression,
but it was also about style. Falling in love with
Benson and falling in love with drifting went hand
in hand for Nadine. “Yeah, his car was pretty
nice. He had this front that I wanted, and I told
him, ‘I want that,’” she said, which
was her way of flirting. Benson, who had just
started learning how to drift on corkscrew canyon
roads up in the San Gabriel Mountains and in
industrial parking lots late at night, let Nadine
do donuts in his car. Together they drove tight
360s, pushed together by centrifugal force. Someday
I imagined they might drift in tandem, two cars
gliding side by side, inches apart on two parallel
lines that never intersect. “It’s really
technical,” said Nadine, “You can’t
just drive side-by-side with anyone. You have to
know their drift line. You have to know the driver
that you’re driving with.”
Other boyfriends were threatened. Why did their
girls have to go to meetings? Did they really think
they were going to race? One girl told Nadine that
her boyfriend was mad because she was at meetings
when she should be spending time with him. Nadine
shrugged.
“Dude, if I wasn’t doing this,
I’d probably be sitting at home by myself
thinking about Starbucks Barista Bears,” said
Noelle, who collects Beanie Babies.
“Dude, at least you don’t have to get
up at 5 in the morning to wash sick peoples’
butts,” said Khristine Barras, who is studying
to be a nurse. We watched as several guys affixed a
gold Tanabe sticker to the side of Benson’s
car.
Motorsports is expensive, prohibitively so. Who
stays in racing and who doesn’t may, in the
end, depend upon sponsorship. A custom fire suit,
required for when Nadine starts to compete, costs a
thousand dollars. She has spent $10,000 on
modifications — the wheels alone are worth
more than the car. Nadine is the only girl drifter
sponsored by Yokohama, by any tire company in fact,
and they give her tires that cost $270 each. Since
high-performance tires wear out faster than
everyday ones, a professional drifter can go
through 10 sets of them on a race day. None of the
Drifting Pretty girls have significant sponsorship
yet. The girls pay for their own car parts, for
entrance fees to race events and a $50 annual
membership due to Nadine to cover the cost of the
pop-up tent, chips and drinks, a cooler, two
T-shirts and stickers.
A good thing, then, that clothing companies love
girls and driving. Schikane, a street racing
“lifestyle” brand, sponsored one of the
Drifting Pretty girls, Kat Andrade, a petite
Filipino girl with a sweet, childlike smile that
made you want to take her home and feed her ice
cream. Reps approached her at driving meets and
asked her if she would wear T-shirts for them. She
had the look that a lot of guys liked. Plus she was
unusual because her car was an automatic. “She
doesn’t even know how to drive stick, and
she’s kicking ass in drifting. She gets a lot
of attention,” said Nadine.
In a way, you have to not get too attached to
your car. All the Japanese pro guys have totaled
cars before. Nadine never has. You have come to
love your car, but because of the nature of
drifting, you have to then be willing to smash it
up. “What’s hard for girls is that
they’re not driven by testosterone,” said
Benson. “They’re not ready to be
aggressive and rough with their cars. You make a
lot of noise when you drift, a lot of smoke. You
have to throw the weight of the car around.”
Benson, who is reserved and conservative in daily
life, has an excellent racing line, but not the
crazy, jerky showboating style that drives the
crowds wild and keeps spectators on the edge of
their seats thinking of flaming infernos. Nadine,
for her part, said she tended to analyze things too
much. “It’s all in your head. I’ll
drive and I’ll look at a pole. And the rule in
drifting is you’ve always got to be looking
ahead. You look towards where you want to go . . .
And I kept looking at the poles.”
One evening at Autolink Motorworks, deep in the
San Gabriel Valley, the Drifting Pretty girls were
in the process of replacing Nadine’s clutch.
Nadine’s mechanic friend Chinky Chao was
providing expertise on-call. Chinky had patience
bordering on the Christ-like and a face riddled
with piercings — a bar between his eyebrows,
lip studs, and two wicked spikes that looked like
he had swallowed a steel-fanged insect that had
then tried to claw its way out of his mouth by way
of his chin. Nadine’s car, raised on the
hydraulic lift, loomed above our heads. In the
half-light, it felt as if we were inside an
Egyptian tomb, squinting up at the car’s
vulnerable underbelly, its parts laid out like
hieroglyphs. Nadine held up a fluorescent
flashlight, illuminating the dark, tangled mass of
metal.
Last time they took off the drive shaft, it
bonked another girl, Amanda Lam, on the head.
Amanda, not surprisingly, stayed home this
particular evening, and only four girls were
present. There was Khristine again, eyes ringed in
smoky liner, who, as Nadine’s designated
“screw bitch,” had the job of collecting
the screws that came out of the car as parts were
expelled. There was Lorraine Ragosta, one of the
two non-Asians in Drifting Pretty, nicknamed
“the other white girl.” She and a
sprightly girl named Thao Nguyen took turns being
Nadine’s “tool bitch.” And finally
there was Casidi Tanaka, with a cute bobbed haircut
and pleasant girl-next-door looks, who was
Nadine’s “light bitch.”
The exasperating thing about car work is that
just to get to one simple part, you have to remove
all this other crap around it. “Next time
I’ll bring little Tupperwares for the
screws,” said Lorraine, who was in a Martha
Stewart kick. “We can even label them.”
Next door, a car roared. A lanky, bald mechanic
with a wiry goatee fiddled with a laptop attached
to the car’s engine. Dr. Charles, as he is
known, was dyno-ing the car to measure its
horsepower. Gridlike patterns flickered on his
laptop. “Dr. Charles was famous in his
day,” Nadine said. “That was eight years
ago. Which is a long time in our world. He was the
king.”
“Allll right!” she said. “Quick
tech lesson. My darlings, what are these?”
Nadine pointed to a part of her car.
“Tension rod!” shouted Thao.
“What are these?”
“Sway bar!” said Thao again.
“What’s this thing-thing?” Nadine
explained which parts go bad fast, which parts are
stock and which are popular upgrades, which parts
made funny noises when they hit bumps. Oil pan.
Side-mount inner coil. Steering rod. Transmission.
Differential.
“What’s this?” she asked,
shushing Thao, pointing to another girl.
“Gas tank?” ventured Lorraine.
“Yes,” said Nadine, tapping the part.
“Don’t fuck it up.”
“What is this?” Benson wandered by and
pointed nonchalantly to a tiny part, a part so
small and random it seemed to be merely a part of a
part.
The girls and Nadine paused.
“That’s the traction rod,” he
said nicely. Nadine smiled, sheepish. “Oh
yeah, we didn’t learn those yet.”
It was midnight by the time they began the
laborious process of putting back in all the parts
they’d taken out. So far, they had talked
about car things: which driver cut who off on the
track while drifting, which jerk driver drifts
badly and illegally. About girlie things: being
single versus having boyfriends, the cost of a
Tiffany ring, the ultimate man, about already
having names for the kids they haven’t yet
had. About current events: how Khristine wants a
belly-button ring with a little car on it, about
who hadn’t yet seen The Princess Bride and
about how the new Liz Phair song was about breaking
up. They had also talked about less girlie, more
perverted things: like Nadine’s Playgirl
subscription and the naked model they had dubbed
Nadine’s favorite, the one hanging from the
tree; about “sluts and whores”; about how
her friend Alex saw the magazine and “spent
hours” examining it. And the car still
wasn’t done.
“It’s all worth it when we
drift,” Thao sighed. Drift Day, when the girls
would spend an entire day at the track, was one
week away. “I’m gonna dress up like a pit
honey. Or like those Umbrella Girls from D1,”
Khristine said, tracing out the curves of a low-cut
dress over her mechanic suit, “I’m gonna
wear stripper heels and a booty skirt and bend over
to check my tires.” The girls giggled.
“Oops,” Kristine said playfully, bending
over from the waist and arching her back. “I
dropped something.”
At one point the conversation turned to the
subject of rice. Thao had said that all true
motorsports aficionados were family, but that they
just didn’t like rice. What’s rice?
I’d asked.
“Rice is when you spend tons of money
making your car look fancy, but put no money into
making it perform better,” said Thao.
“Rice is when a car has cheesy neon running
lights all underneath that make the street glow
blue,” said Khristine.
“Rice are the ones that try to drift around
corners on the street for no reason,” said
Thao.
“Rice are the ones that trick out their
mufflers to make them sound like bumblebees stuck
in tin cans,” said Khristine.
“Or the ones that smash into walls while
canyon racing,” said Thao.
“Or the ones that pull up next to you all
gangstered up and rev their engines.”
“Or the ones that put wings on their cars
that look like park benches.”
“Or the ones that have chicks riding
passenger who think they’re cool ’cause
their boyfriend drives a rice car.”
“Or crazy yellow tinted windows.”
“Or Honda Civics.”
“Or Hot Import Nights.”
“Or the little import model that comes to
the meets every Thursday dressed in a tiny little
dress even though it’s freezing cold
outside.”
Rice was slippery. It was a noun, a verb and an
adjective, and might signify either a person, place
or thing. It was an insult, an expletive, a
fighting word, but it was also a silly word. Rice
was both the joke and the punch line, all show, no
go. Traditionally, it was an abbreviation for
“rice rocket,” which was a nickname for a
tricked-out import car, which was a car made in
Asia, driven, usually, by Asians. But, to
Nadine’s girls at least, rice was the state of
thinking you’re hot, but you’re not.
At the Drifting Pretty Awards Day, held in one
of the girls’ living room in a palatial,
marble-floored house in Irvine, Nadine gave a pop
quiz on engine parts. Amanda, who was the only one
to sketch out cartoon diagrams of coilovers and
differentials, won the award for Highest Points
Holder (a.k.a. Points Whore) of the Quarter. Lisa,
who was shipping off in a few weeks to Japan to
pack parachutes for the military, was named Miss
Congeniality. And for the coveted Girl Drifter of
the Quarter award, Thao was a unanimous choice.
Nadine, beaming proud mama, handed each of the
winners certificates printed on petal-pink
stationery, as well as new floor mats — the
same Hawaiian surfer-girl mats she has in her
car.
In Nadine’s cult of girl racers, there will
be, as in the Girl Scouts, a rule book for
everybody to abide by. They will all be connected,
a society of girl drifters in America. There will
be Drifting Pretty chapters across the states.
“No, not like a cult!” she corrected.
“More a network. I’m not like, ‘Die,
guys, die!’” She dreams of the day when
her girls will be excellent enough drifters to
merit a visit from one of Japan’s all-girl
pro-level drift teams. Team Kumakazoku perhaps. It
will be like a United Nations meeting. They will
discuss drifting techniques and watch drifting
videos. Perhaps they will go clubbing.
But the truth is that there are no really good
girl drivers here yet. Nadine and her girlfriends
are okay, but they’re not great. As much as
they’ve improved, there’s still the
intimidation factor, the one-girl syndrome. “I
feel that the reason I’m not that good yet is
because all last year when I was at the monthly
practices at the track, it was just me and
occasionally Yoshie,” said Nadine. “And
all the guys were watching me. And they were like,
there’s that one girl. I was like, just drive.
I didn’t want to compete, either. Because
there’s that . . . expectation. You have to
have the right mindset. If you’re not
confident, you’re gonna hit the wall. That
really kind of screwed things up,” she said.
“Now we have to get good.”
Recently, a new girl appeared on the scene, an
Asian model named Verena Mei who enrolled in a
driving school. “She just popped up this year.
I saw her at an event and said, ‘Who is
she?’” Nadine said. A twinge of cattiness
bubbled to the surface, then was gone. Nadine
generously admitted that Verena Mei was cute, but
noted that she only drives the driving
school’s car. “She’s actually going
to compete in the middle of this year at one of the
events. I’m happy for her that she’s not
going to be a typical model and that she’s
going to get out there and drive . . . I’m
going to try to get to know her.”
In July, it is Yoshie who will get to know
Verena Mei — as a driver. The two will be the
only girl competitors in Sonoma at the semiannual
Formula D, which will feature all the top drifters
in the U.S. “I don’t know how good she
is,” mused Yoshie in a sprawling parking lot
at the California Speedway in Fontana, where the
girls had gathered for their monthly practice.
Nadine wasn’t there, having gone to play pit
honey to Benson at a drift competition in Georgia.
“Sometimes there is less pressure when
she’s not here,” said Yoshie
meaningfully. We wondered how Nadine would do at
this year’s D1 in December, when it was her
turn. “She has a better car than all of us,
but she has not yet experienced that kind of harsh
environment,” said Yoshie, who has. “She
says she’s not yet ready. I don’t know
what’s stopping her.” In the coned lot,
the girls skidded around, timidly at first then
more aggressively as the day wore on. I thought of
the stares from the guys. The walls. The poles of
doom.
“You rocked out there!” one girl said
to another. “You were crazy.” It was
thrilling to see the girls throwing the weight of
their cars around, kicking up dust, making smoke.
The radio in someone’s car played a Jessica
Simpson remake of “Take My Breath Away.”
It was Thao’s 20th birthday, and at the end of
the day, the girls gathered around a cake atop the
trunk of Noelle’s Nissan. They cut the cake
with a chopstick and passed messy chunks of it
around on paper napkins. In a few months, Nadine
and Yoshie would be choosing the five best girls to
make up Team Drifting Pretty, the first official
girls’ competitive drift-racing team in the
U.S. Yokohama had promised them tires. This was a
generation of girls who had no readily available
role models in a sport that was itself just coming
of age. So in a way, they were pioneers. Whatever
happened, whichever of them won or lost or made it
onto the team or didn’t, in the end this was
how I wanted to remember them. Just a bunch of
girls covered in a fine layer of track dust,
laughing, complex; drifting together, with purpose,
on burning wheels.
Source: By Gendy Alimurung,
www.laweekly.com/general/features/drifting-pretty/9259/
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