10 years and still putting in work! NonStopTuning has been a driving force in the Texas car scene for what seems like forever. Come out to a LoneStarDrift event and you’ll be hard pressed to find a car not rocking one of their parts or at least sporting their logo decal. It’d been a long time coming and with Formula D right around the bend, NonStopTuning has no intention of slowing down.

The same can also be said for the Lone star Drift brand. With a huge number of entrants to this first round, the ProAM and TXSL series both had a good roster of competing cars ready to rip the track. It’s going to be a good year.

On Saturday I dropped by late in the afternoon after qualifying had already concluded. I arrived to a bunch of guys just out on the course having fun, and well, that’s what Lone Star Drift is all about.

Still, I asked around to find out how the competition qualifying went down. I was quickly informed that a huge amount of people competed this round. For the first time in history, Lone Star Drift’s Pro Am had a Top 32 tournament set for Day 2. Even TXSL had a top 16! I guess you can say that the season was starting well.

I decided to just chill on track and take photos for the remainder of the day. I caught up with a lot of old media friends I haven’t seen in months and snapshat cars that I haven’t in longer.

Always psyched to see ~~a Celica at any time~~ a new car out on the track. Never seen this car do work before, but good God, if I did, its exhaust would still be ringing in my ears.

As the sun set and the driving stopped, Lone star Drift began setting up for the party that night, which I promptly ninja’d out of because I am a baby and need 8 hours of sleep to be at my drifitiest.

The next morning I rendezvoused with my Houston 86 brethren, a lot of which were entering NonStopTuning’s Car Show.

image provided by NonStopTuning and www.clearlakesubaru.com — *Image courtesy of NonStopTuning and www.clearlakesubaru.com*

NonStopTuning was pretty ambitious with the car show and had a great deal of classes to enter, as if to say that any car and every car is worth building. I’m down with it.

Sure enough, show cars of all kinds were lined up all the way out of the park ready for display.

The trophy medals were some seriously spiffy stuff. I really dug the custom touch to them and I do think my buddy Michael with the Red FR-S took one of these bad boys home at the end of the day.

Out in the pits me and the homie Hunter were dialing in our own 86’s to play on the track. We take this Yin Yang stuff seriously.

There were a lot of other pretty cars in the pits too. Hey, Good Looking.

If you haven’t learned about my Miata bias yet then you have not been reading these articles close enough. I have not seen so many Roadsters at Lone Star Drift before, so the experience was heavenly.

I proceeded to spend most of the day getting sideways like all the other cool kids. M y skills are a work in progress so here’s a photo of someone much better than me. You’d think I’d have a gopro by now.

The drivers meeting covered the same stuff as usual: Use common Sense. Easy right? I mean, yeah, of course. Otherwise bad things happen to the body panels of pretty drift cars.

One thing that was a little different was the sheer amount of drivers present for the competition meeting. I mean, geez, talk about a full house. To be fair though, NonStopTuning really makes it appealing to participate in Formula D sanctioned competitions (such as Lone Star Drift’s Pro Am and TXSL) with their Drift Contingency program. Benefits include Season end Prize money, free swag, parts discounts and a lot of other neat stuff. Find out more about the program here!

Eventually the competition got started and the gloves were on the ground across the board. Aaron keeps trying to defend the TXSL cars’ lack of power (most under 250 to the wheel) as being more fun to compete with, even if they aren’t as exciting to watch.

But I personally cannot see what’s not to like about super stylish drift cars going hard in each other’s paint. Plenty of drivers were getting ridiculously close with each other in what were definitely not your archetypical drift missiles.

Brad Burnett’s AE86 took the day in the TXSL and it was quite a sight to see a car win something and still have all its bumpers and aero attached.

Later in the ProAm bracket however, the carnage got pretty wild.

I don’t remember there being this much bumper car action going on in Pro Am during previous seasons. Guys were seriously going for massive proximity in their tandem runs and occasionally they’d get their chocolate in each other’s peanut butter.

Rest in Peace to the San Antonio Scooter Gang who perished in the catastrophic Razor Tandem tragedy. They were so young.

Us media guys had a close call of our own when Axle and Harrison explored the boundaries of new clipping points during their tandem battle, but I still maintain I didn’t pussy out and step back. Seriously. Come on, for real. Brohonestly. Stop trying to embarrass me in front of the cooler photographers.

True to his word, Aaron Losey decided to compete in ProAm with the Tyler Cox missile car. With the V8 transplant that was put into it late last season, it’s got the torque and power to put itself anywhere it needs to be. Much to the chagrin of the guys who haven’t brushed up on their body work skills.

If it weren’t for mechanical gremlins, he’d have been more than just a major disturbance to the top 16 ladder.

Things got increasingly more vicious as the brackets were climbed.

Some battles were tougher to call than others and many went one more time, more than just one more time. Kinda cut into my non-compeition driving practice on the big course, but hey, I’m not salty. (Insert grumbling under breath here)

Eventually it came down to Randall Waters and John Windham. By the end of the day it would be decided that Randall would take first in Lone Star Drift’s Season opener.

While Round 1 is over, this post certainly isn’t! I have made a conscious decision to get an extra 3 hours of sleep by not culling photos from my initial upload. Enjoy the gigantic galleries below that I have split by day and put in chronological order. I spoil you so much.