No Star Bash XV Celebrates Midwest Drift Culture with Over 150 Drivers
Sam HouseThe fifteenth iteration of Drift Indy’s No Star Bash, their biggest event of the season, brought together over 150 drivers for three full days of drifting Sept. 18-20 at Xenia, Ohio’s Darana Raceway. The celebration of Midwest drift culture also included the third and final round of the season of the Drift Indy Grand Prix series.
NSB has taken many forms over the years, including the introduction of various off-track events. In recent years, though, the focus has shifted firmly back to the on-track spectacle. The introduction of DIGP last season made for a killer Saturday night show that the crew opted to repeat this year, albeit with more practice included in the schedule and time specifically allotted for the long 15+ car party trains the event has become known for.
Xenia’s Darana Raceway is an unassuming venue for one of the Midwest’s biggest drift events, but years of hosting events there has allowed Drift Indy to make strides toward maximizing its potential. Sure, the grandstands are a little old and there are still some potholes in the pits and sure, only some of the bathroom stall doors have locks on them, but seeing three lanes of cars on grid taking up a whole third of the oval, all raring to send it, makes the place feel just right.
NSB has a habit of drawing drivers that normally wouldn’t make the trip to small-town Ohio. This year’s roster of drivers included the Top Garage crew from the Atlanta area, the Grip Royal / Team Shriek gang from the Mississippi area and a big ol’ car hauler full of Texas drivers. The Top Garage and Texas delegations both included young shredders tossing their hats into the DIGP ring. Jake Clark, Harrison Johnson and Camron Roman threw some curveballs into the mix of drivers on the hunt for the season’s top spot.
After a few hours of hot lapping from the full field of NSB drivers that saw some early, unfortunate wrecks as folks felt out the track’s infamous walls and banks, the course was reset for GP qualifying. The first outer zone challenged drivers to toss it high and wide into one corner of the course’s strangely-shaped walls.
Fast cars, a treacherous entry and a bunch of guys hell-bent on making their way into Saturday night’s big show meant the wall was going to claim some victims. There were plenty of wall taps and drags, but Chad Anderson’s hit on his second qualifying run straightened him and put the front of his Coyote-swapped E46 into the wall, ripping apart the front passenger-side suspension. He managed to drive it off track somehow, despite the tire being pushed all the way back against the wheel well, and he and his teammates set to work diagnosing what all was broken:
Coilover
Wiseman arm bent
Sheared knuckle bolts
Bent knuckle
Strut tower moved about 2.5”
Ripped strut tower from top to frame rail (was later rebuilt with plate from ace hardware)
Broken rotor
Wheel had a hole blown in it
Tire popped
Passenger side of car all torn up
Per Anderson, he was ready to call it for the weekend. His teammates wouldn’t let him. When his first run scored high enough for him to qualify third, there was no question. Whatever it took, the car was getting put back together in time for the next evening’s Top 16.
Camron Roman, in his DIGP debut, put on an absolute show with his qualifying runs and earned himself the top spot. He was cool, calm and collected behind the wheel of his E92, despite being at an unfamiliar track. His runs weren’t always the flashiest, but damn was he consistent. Josh Estey, the points leader going into the round, took the second qualifying spot with two heaters of his own.
The conclusion of qualifying meant the track could open up for some big party trains under the lights. With all three lanes open, grid probably ends up with close to 100 cars lined up at its busiest. With 15+ cars being sent at once pretty regularly, even that big of a group of drivers moves pretty quick. It’s an impressive sight, even at a relatively small track.
While much of NSB is geared toward more experienced drivers, C group gets tons and tons of laps, too. It’s rad to see so many of them improving over the course of the weekend from spinning most laps on Friday to being just about tandem-ready by the end of the day Sunday.
Saturday’s Roller Dog Championship has become a staple of NSB, too. For the uninitiated, it’s a timed hot dog-eating contest that pits some of the hungriest glizzy gladiators in the immediate vicinity against one another, with the winner receiving a pretty sick wrestling-style belt. This year’s championship was a tag-team format that saw six teams of two choking down a tray of thirteen dogs per pair.
Rick Wainscott, the returning champion, teamed up with Caleb Schmidt to absolutely dominate this year’s competition. It wasn’t particularly close, and Wainscott had plenty of time to showboat on his way to his second straight belt. Absolute peak human performance on display.
The RDC was a tough act to follow, but DIGP just about managed to put on a better show a few hours later. Last year’s version of this course layout unintentionally benefitted higher-horsepower cars with a long run up to initiation, so a pinch point was added that helped even the playing field and led to some really killer, close matchups. It’s very rare to have a bad battle in the series, but the judges don’t shy away from making course adjustments that both challenge the drivers and make for a better spectacle for everyone watching.
The first One More Time call of the day came in just the second battle. Brian Waggoner and Britt Kaukeinen, both DI regulars and shredders in their own right, put down super sweet back-to-back runs that were too close to call. They kept the intensity up when they ran it back, too. In his lead run, Waggoner managed to tap the wall twice through the first outer zone, somehow managing to stay in drift and not bin it. He was so high up the bank and his car is so low that he managed to scoop up a bunch of the tire bits that were piled along the wall with his rear bumper. Perhaps not appreciating how much Waggoner had made them pucker with his close call with the wall, the judges gave the nod to the ever-consistent Kaukeinen.
They were followed in the bracket by a battle of the Justins, Medina versus Bailey, in two absolute smoke machines. After failing to qualify at Round Two after finishing second at Round One, Medina had his sights firmly set on a return to the podium. DIGP rookie Bailey, barring any mechanical issues, can hang with just about anybody in his big body LS-swapped E90 sedan. When the smoke cleared on their battle, though, the more experienced Medina won out.
In what was easily one of the most impressive off-track performances of the weekend and, likely, the whole season, Anderson’s Humpty Dumpty of a car got put back together in time for him to absolutely shred in his battles. He, his Bobby’s Crew teammates and a handful of other good samaritans, filling in for the absent king’s horses and men, worked their magic and had the car looking just shy of good as new. Underneath, it was far from perfect, but it turned out to be more than good enough.
Looking completely unfazed by his collision the day before, Anderson went to work against rookie Justin Keith, getting the win and advancing after being just about ready to throw in the towel less than 24 hours before.
The Top 16 saw two big upsets with huge implications for the season standings. The first came in the battle between second-place overall Mike Steele and rookie Blake Doege. Steele trailed teammate Josh Estey by a single point coming into the final round and was looking to continue the heater he had been on all season long. Doege, on the other hand, had failed to qualify at the first two rounds and was pushing hard to earn as many points as he could in his first push into the main event. Both piloting LS-powered S14s, the odds were pretty firmly weighted in Steele’s favor. He lead first with Doege dutifully following, albeit a little shallow and lacking some proximity at times. When they swapped sides, Steele was displaying his typical aggressiveness in the chase behind a solid lead from Doege, but that aggressiveness bit him in the ass when he didn’t leave Doege room to transition and made contact. The rookie slayed a giant and advanced to the Top 8.
The final battle of the Top 16 was between points leader Estey and Danger Dan Sommer, who found himself in a similar boat to Doege after tallying zero points so far in his admittedly underpowered NB Miata. Sommer was on a mission to hurt some feelings and make his Miata Alliance teammates proud, and he was able to do just that, albeit with a little help. Estey was wrestling with some engine issues during practice, and his car sounded unhealthy as soon as they left the line. He did what he could, but was unable to stay in drift for either of their two runs. Sommer advanced to a matchup with another four cylinder S-chassis, this time piloted by Team Smooth Brain’s Sam Cornewell.
The upsets didn’t continue into the Top Eight, though, at least from a qualifying standpoint. In each of the four matchups, the driver who qualified higher advanced. That certainly doesn’t mean that the battles were boring or predictable, however. Top qualifier Cam Roman had his work cut out for him against Kaukeinen, but he was able to put together a great lead run and a very solid chase to advance past the Fortune Fleet C5 pilot.
Anderson found himself matched up with Jake Clark, each of them behind the wheel of one of the fastest-looking cars around the course. Clark wasn’t without his own mechanical troubles that weekend, though his were a little different to Anderson’s. Clark’s dad said that they had recently changed the type of spark plug they were running, and every few laps the car would blow one out, leaving it down a cylinder. Nevertheless, it was healthy enough for the two drivers to put on a sick show, and they did just that.
In fact, it was so sick that the judges just had to see it one more time. Anderson managed to open up a solid gap in his lead run, putting a car and a half or so on Clark before they swung through the bank in front of the grandstands. He managed to keep his own proximity much tighter when they swapped spots, and the judges had seen enough to put Anderson through to the semis.
He advanced to a matchup with Cornewell, while Roman and Medina lined it up on the other side of the bracket. Roman and Medina had yet another very close battle, but the young shredder from Texas just managed to edge out Medina with some very impressive proximity through the infield.
Anderson and Cornewell’s battle had some very serious implications for the championship standings, whether they realized it at the time or not. With his early exit, Estey was sitting on 53 points, enough to secure the season’s top spot. With a win over Anderson and another over Roman to take the top step of the podium at the round, Cornewell would have tied Estey and the staff would’ve had to figure out a way for them to break the tie. As it happened, though, Anderson put together two more killer runs that combined with a hard wall tap and straighten from Cornewell to put the hurriedly rebuilt Bimmer through to the finals.
Faced with some dangerously worn suspension components, Medina bowed out of his third place matchup with Cornewell, who earned his first DIGP hardware. Anderson and Roman sent it in the final battle of the night, pitting something of a Cinderella story event from Anderson against the potential for the first-ever perfect round in DIGP’s short history from Roman.
In the end, the judges ruled in favor of Roman, making him the first ever driver to both qualify first and win the round. His incredible consistency and balanced aggressiveness gave him the edge and gave Anderson his second silver finish in a row.
That result solidified the season standings, with Estey on top, Mike Steele and Cornewell tied for second and Anderson in third, fourth if the rulebook made provisions for a tiebreaker for final standings.
It was a very rad ending to the second season of a series that feels like it’s setting a new tone for what competition drifting in the US can be. Close battles between skilled drivers in stylish, fairly evenly-matched cars are possible, it turns out, and DIGP has them in spades.
The end of the competition wasn’t the end of the Saturday night festivities at NSB, though. That honor belonged to the second iteration of Uncle Jimmy’s bingo night. Somehow, this year managed to be even jankier than last year, with contestants having to take a photo of their cards and marking their numbers by editing the photos in lieu of actual markers or those little, transparent colored discs that look like they’d taste really good to toddlers. The prizes were once again excellent and included a Buzzball, a bottle of Hidden Valley ranch, a gas station boner pill and, best of all, Uncle Jimmy’s very own loose cigarette. Everybody went home happy, except for the losers.
Sunday at NSB is a very liminal-feeling time. Some folks are deliriously tired, others are hungover, some are, somewhat annoyingly, still bright-eyed and feeling just fine and ready to turn yet more laps. More power to them.
Joking aside, it’s a very chill day traditionally. This year, the GP drivers who decided to stick around played musical cars, taking turns behind the wheel of each others’ rides. It was both an exercise in trust and a testament to the skill of the roster seeing them turn laps in some very alien setups.
When the smoke cleared on the three-day event, it was evident that Drift Indy had pulled off another classic celebration of Midwest drift culture. Thousands of laps turned, thousands of people treated to some truly excellent driving and more than enough hot dogs consumed means a very successful bash has been had. Here’s to an even bigger NSB XVI in 2027.