Knuckle Up Training Day January 2024

Knuckle up, if you buck.

Knuckle Up is an event organizer for Drifting Events in Houston Texas. Their goal was to create an environment that embodies the grassroots drifting from Japan in the 90s-2000s era of drifting. What does that mean? Low cars, wide wheels, stylish body kits, and flashy paint and graphics. One of their main rules to attend their events is that ALL body panels but be intact before arriving and your car must look presentable, as if it were going to be judged at a car show. One of the old saying for drifting is "It's a moving car show".

Training Day.

Outside of Knuckle Up's normal events, they occasionally hose what's called Training Day. The name speaks for itself. This event is for those who have never driven at a Knuckle Up event and are learning the basics of car control until they can "level-up" and are invited to their normal seasonal events. I actually drove at this training day event. To put it in perspective, I started drifting in 2015 in a 1990 Nissan Laurel. I considered myself late to the drifting game because I'd been doing time-attack and street car builds for 10 whole years before my drifting endeavor. Back to the Nissan Laurel, it's a 2.0L six-cylinder turbo, RWD. I tell people it's essentially a luxury 4-door skyline. This car I want to say is arguably the hardest car to start and learn to drift. But hey, I mastered it after a year and I ONLY know how to drive that car. That brings us to Training Day. I picked up a very good value 350z Track edition that is set up for drifting, but I could not figure out how to drive a naturally aspirated car, with one of the best mechanically handling chassis. While I had driven Knuckle Up a couple of times, they allowed me to come to learn in my new-to-me car.

Be free like a dove.

Knuckle Up provides a safe and encouraging community because they understand the process and growing pains to learn something new. The car community can be weird and gatekeep newcomers treading along someone's existing hobby. Knuckle Up wanted to rid that feeling and make everyone feel welcome. One of their teaching methods is just letting people go out on the empty skid pad and figure it out. It's like throwing a baby in a pool and hoping they'll paddle back to the edge without needing an adult to jump in. And honestly, this method works really well. They may give tips on how certain mechanics work such as handbrake pull or a clutch kick. You get to try out new things and understand how the car behaves.

Speaking of behaving, I was having a hard time understanding the mechanical grip of the car. In which it did not give me enough confidence to trust the car to do what I wanted it to do. It was pure chance that the temperatures were in the 50s, and it had previously rained the morning off. That means there was less grip for the car which helped me understand and have full control of the car once the rear kicked out. I was able to finally able to control the car how I wanted, and perform figure 8's around 2 cones in any direction I wanted. This made me one of the first few who leveled up and was now allowed to drive on the Speed Sports track.

Involved in an Accident, call the Texas Hammer.

Now that you're on what people call the "big boy" track, which is a paved go-cart track, with rumble strips and grass for the runoff. I'll admit, I went off a couple of times because the track was still patchy with wet spots from the rain. With the sudden dry-to-wet transitions, the car instantly spins from under you and I just went straight off in the mud. Luckily, that was the most that ever happened to me. Unfortunately for the good friend and co-worker Ryan in this Red S550 EcoBoost Mustang, he had a suspension failure completely unrelated to anything previously mentioned. One of his steering tierods completely sheared off and he lost steering control. Our theory was the "performance" aftermarket tierod end had a manufacturing defect and failed while under the stress of full lock counter-steering at high speeds. We got wheel dollies to roll him off track, and then with the help of his dad picked up OE replacement tierods so that we could get his car back on the road to drive home.

Learning experiences

Without a safe place to learn car control and the limits of your vehicle, it would be very dangerous to perform all these actions on the streets. Not only are you endangering yourself, but others on the road and any public/private property. I am grateful for events like these. I know it would have been near impossible for me to do this same thing in the 2000's because events like this didn't exist locally to me, or it would have been very expensive to privately rent a lot and have no guidance on what to do. Everyone be safe out there. Enjoy your cars, pushing your driving, keep it off the streets.