After our last successful set of interviews for Honda Tuning magazine, the editors asked us to speak with SPEED World Challenge champion Pierre Kleinubing and his Realtime Racing team to find out about their jump into the world of drifting. We finally tracked him down shortly after SEMA, and discussed the development of the RealTime drift S2000, his 2006 drift season, plans for the upcoming season. Check out the feature in the May issue of w magazine.
Honda Tuning: Who brought up drifting to the RealTime team, how did the idea develop into building the car?
Nathan Bonneau: Well, I think drifting first came into the picture around 2004 or so, there was a drifting exhibition on the road course at one of the touring car events at Road Atlanta, and we had a car there that we were competing with. Our team watched the demo, and thought “that looks cool.” Since we do all the Bridgestone ride-and-drives, Bridgestone was they were showing off one of their new tires at an event on the Apex RX7, they brought a Japanese driver and both Pierre (Kleinubing) and Peter Cunningham both rode along in it and drove it a little, and Pierre was hooked. We waited to see if the drifting fad was going to come and go, or not, so we sat back for a little bit to see how it would play out.
NB: From start to finish, we built the car in 3 weeks. We got the car in March, stripped it down, and then it sat there in the corner of the shop while we focused on the touring car for the following few weeks. We knew we wanted to go to Road Atlanta in May, so we put our heads down and wanted to bang the car out and get it completed. The first time we even drove the car was the day before the Atlanta Formula D event at Linear Speedway across the street. We were happy that nothing broke! The only thing we’ve really broken on the car was a set of axles. We took the time and built the motor right with Molley pistons and Carillo rods, we built the motor to take the stress. When we went to Atlanta, we didn’t know what to expect. We had a little bit of a road race setup in the car, we found out quickly that wasn’t going to work. We made changes to things like toe, caster, and camber, but we found out that we had too stiff of springs there so we started playing with some of the shock settings.
NB: Our first goal for Atlanta was not to break at all. Then our second goal was to make it to Day 2 (by qualifying in the unseeded practice), which we did. When we went to Chicago, we had made a few changes like tweaking the blower, changing the springs out, and we had a little bit higher expectations from there with some experience under our belt. We didn’t quite do as good as we could have, but that’s the way things go. We were really happy overall with our performance, and I think our sponsors were really happy, so that’s all that matters.
NB: We would like to do more than 2 races, but we have to compare the schedule to the World Challenge schedule. We would like to maybe do New Jersey, maybe bring the car out to California depending on scheduling. World challenge comes first for us. There’s a fine line between what we can and can’t go do, we don’t want to take away from the World Challenge program.
HT: Who has helped you the most with developing this car?
NB: I know Tanner Foust on a personal level, he’s been really helpful to us. I’ve known him for a few years from the ride-and-drive programs and rallying as well as other motorsports events. John at AEM has helped us a little bit, but all in all it’s just been us to try and make a go of it. I think we know where we need to go, we make good HP and good torque, but not in the right powerband. We also need to make more steering angle, we know how to do it, we just need to make a budget and find some time to do it. Hopefully we can show everybody we can do this and fit in with the crowd.
NB: For what we spent on the program, I think we turned out a pretty good car. Some of the parts on the car are a little bit better than maybe what some people would expect to see on a drift car, it’s got a full EFI 4 channel standalone ecu, it’s got air jacks, the only thing I really would like is a full gearbox in the car, then we could have some fun! This season has been fun overall, the guys are pretty happy, and I think we have a car and a driver we can be proud of. With a little more practice, we can definitely be competitive.
Driver Pierre Kleinubing
Honda Tuning: What attracted you to the sport of drifting?
Pierre Kleinubing: I like being able to go out onto the race track and just thrash on the car and tear through tires, and not have to care about the equipment or anything like that. With the World Challenge car, everything is carefully monitored and logged, and we can’t push things too hard, especially in testing. Drifting has a very different mentality.
PK: I had a bunch of friends in the sport, I’ve known Tanner (Foust), Sam (Hubinette), and Rich (Rutherford) for awhile now, and I was able to get a bunch of information from them. I drove the Apex RX7 drift car around 3 years ago at some dealer demos with Bridgestone had an idea of what to do and where to go with it. I also drove for Apex a little bit this year when Realtime couldn’t make it out, mainly at Sonoma and Irwindale. I’m good friends with Shaun and all the guys at Apex, they’ve helped teach me how to setup the drift car and what to watch for..
PK: I really like it, we got better and better every time we went out. We learned a bunch about the sport and all the different aspects like car setup, driving style, and all that, but overall, it’s pretty cool. I hope we can do it again next year with our busy schedule and the licensing situation. Right now, Formula D is contemplating giving me a license or not, if that doesn’t happen then I might do a few D1 events with Apex depending on time.
PK: The hardest thing is the schedule, this year will be even harder because I’ll be driving a car in Grand-AM Cup as well. From March to end of Nov, I’ll be at one race track or another every weekend. I haven’t driven Grand-AM cup in almost 10 years now, so I’m excited to get back into it. Realtime has been my gig for the past 10 years. But it’s just going to make me that much busier.
PK: Our goal for World Challenge is to win it again. The series is pretty competitive, and we’ve been working hard testing the car. We tested before Christmas, took a little break for the holidays, and we’re testing in January and February as well to get everything fine tuned. We have a great team, hopefully we’ll accomplish our goals again. For drifting, we’re just looking to go out and have fun. We learn new things every time we go out there, it’s nice because there’s no pressure on us.