10 Things We Learned at Formula DRIFT Indianapolis
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Indianapolis was supposed to be the next big step in Formula DRIFT's 2026 experiment with new venues. Instead, it became one of the strangest weekends the series has had in years.
There was a new track and a new layout. A 14-year-old winning PROSPEC. A qualifying session where the difference between looking great and looking mediocre was razor thin. Then there was the rain. Lord, was there rain.
The PRO Top 32 got underway, then everything went sideways. Lightning rolled in, the track flooded, the paddock flooded, people surfed folding tables, and after hours of trying to make the place usable again, Formula DRIFT finally called it. No full Top 32, podium, or PRO winner. Just a very wet Indianapolis Raceway Park.
Still, there was plenty to take away from FD's first trip to Indy.
The new track actually works.
New Formula DRIFT tracks have become a bit of a spectator sport before the cars even arrive. Everybody has an opinion. Too slow. Too fast. Too much transition. Not enough transition. Bad walls. Weird walls. Indianapolis had plenty of online discourse before the first car ever dropped into the new layout.
The course was built specifically for Formula DRIFT, with additional paving added to IRP ahead of the event and input from drivers, judges, and the competition department.
The layout isn't perfect, and there are things FD will undoubtedly continue to tweak, but the basic idea works. It has speed, elevation change, technical sections, and enough room for the cars to actually do what they're supposed to do which is a pretty good starting point for a layout that didn't exist a few months ago.
Qualifying was weird. Really weird.
The Indy track came with a learning curve, and qualifying exposed it immediately. Some drivers looked comfortable, others looked like they were still trying to figure out where the hell the track went. Jack Shanahan eventually found the answer. His 84.63-point run put him on top of the PRO field, ahead of Matt Field and Odi Bakchis.
The interesting part wasn't necessarily the order at the top. It was how compressed everything was underneath it. There wasn't much room between a driver looking like a qualifying hero and one suddenly sitting in the middle of the pack. That's going to happen at a new track, especially one that was built specifically around drifting rather than adapted from an existing road course. Indy made everybody learn at the same time, some just learned faster.
Jack Shanahan keeps quietly collecting championship points.
Here's something that could become important later. Jack Shanahan didn't win Indianapolis. Technically, nobody won Indianapolis, but he did qualify first. That earned him four championship points, and those points count. Formula DRIFT's 2026 championship has already proven that the margins are getting stupidly thin. When the season gets down to the final rounds, nobody is going to care whether those points came from a podium or a qualifying session.
Why are we making a big deal out of four points? Glad you asked. In 2018, James Deane won the championship by just four points. At the 2018 Formula Drift finale in Irwindale, Deane was knocked out in the Top 16 while his championship rival, Fredric Aasbo ran all the way to the finals. The only thing that stopped Aasbo's championship fight was Vaughn Gittin Jr. after they ran five battles to determine who would come out on top. In he end, Vaughn Gittin Jr. was deemed the winner at Irwindale and James Deane would take the championship win...by just four points.
Camren Sorensen is no longer "the young guy."
At some point, we have to stop calling Camren Sorensen the kid. He's 14, so that's admittedly difficult. But after Indianapolis, it is getting harder to use age as the most interesting thing about him.
Sorensen won the PROSPEC round at Indy, beating Jason Webb in the final and becoming the youngest driver to win a Formula DRIFT event. That's impressive on its own but what's more interesting is how comfortable he looked doing it.
There wasn't a giant neon sign above the car screaming future champion. There was just a driver making the right decisions when the pressure showed up. That's the part worth paying attention to.
The Sorensen family has become a Formula DRIFT problem.
Camren wasn't operating in a vacuum. Branden Sorensen is already established in PRO, and Amanda Sorensen made a serious run in PROSPEC before mechanical trouble ended her day.
Three siblings showing up at Formula DRIFT events and making waves isn't exactly normal.
At this point, the Sorensen family garage is starting to look less like a collection of race cars and more like a minor Formula DRIFT feeder program. The family group chat must be absolutely unbearable.
Jason Webb is becoming impossible to ignore.
Jason Webb has been circling the edges of this conversation for a while. Indianapolis pushed him further into it. The South African driver made it all the way to the PROSPEC final, where Sorensen finally stopped him, but the bigger story is the consistency.
Webb isn't showing up, getting lucky, and disappearing. He's putting himself in position to win. PROSPEC is supposed to be the proving ground, and Webb is looking increasingly ready for the next step.
Formula DRIFT finally met something it couldn't outdrive.
Drifting in the rain isn't exactly a foreign concept, but there's a difference between a wet track and a facility that is actively turning into a lake. Once the storms arrived, the problem stopped being tire grip and became logistics.
Track crews were dealing with standing water across the racing surface and flooding throughout portions of the paddock. Fans were stuck waiting while lightning and heavy rain made it impossible to keep the event moving.
Eventually, there just wasn't a safe track left to run on.
That's not a failure on Formula Drift, that's weather winning. It happens.
The weather didn't just ruin the show. It changed the championship.
This is where Indy gets really interesting. The PRO event wasn't simply shortened, it was canceled before the Top 32 could be completed.
Formula DRIFT's official schedule had the PRO main event set for Saturday afternoon and evening, but severe weather eventually made continuing impossible.
That means there was no PRO winner and no one got the points that come with advancing through the bracket. The championship simply moves on and suddenly qualifying points become even more important.
James Deane remains at the top of the standings, with Aurimas Bakchis and Branden Sorensen behind him. Jack Shanahan sits fourth, only one point behind Branden. That's a pretty important detail when you're looking at the season with three rounds remaining.
The fans deserve some credit.
The people who showed up to Indy didn't exactly get the experience they paid for.
They got rain, they got more rain, then a long wait and then even more rain. Eventually, there was no PRO finish.
That sucks.
But there were still plenty of fans hanging around trying to see whether the show would happen and that's something worth acknowledging. Formula DRIFT has spent years trying to turn drifting into a proper spectator sport, and that only works if people actually care enough to stand around for race cars. Apparently, they do even in miserable weather that is actively trying to convince them otherwise.
Indy might end up being more important than it looks right now.
This is probably the biggest takeaway. If you only look at the results sheet, Indianapolis was a mess. PROSPEC had a winner. PRO didn't but that's not necessarily how we'll remember the weekend.
Formula DRIFT took a chance on a new market and built a new course in one of the most influential racing cities in the country. The drivers got their first real shot at figuring it out and the series learned what worked and what didn't.
When Formula DRIFT comes back to Indianapolis, makes a few changes to the layout, gets a dry weekend and puts on the show everyone expected the first time around, Indy could end up looking less like a failed experiment and more like the first chapter of something that eventually worked.
For now, though, Indianapolis gets a pretty unique distinction. It's the Formula DRIFT event where the weather won. And honestly, that's a hell of a way to make an entrance.
