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Throwback Thursday – 2005 Clipping Point: Ken Gushi

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Name: Kenshiro Gushi
Home: San Gabriel, CA
Team: Team Toyo/Ford Racing/Gushi Auto
Nationality: Japanese
Date Of Birth: September 19 1986
Marital Status: Single
Vehicle: 2005 Ford Mustang GT

Tell us about yourself…

I’m Ken Gushi, I’m 18, and a professional drifter for Toyo Tires, Ford, and Gushi Auto. I was born in Japan. I can’t remember whether English or Japanese was a first language, I suck at both. I use more English on a daily basis, but we only use Japanese in the house.

EverythingDrift.com: How did you get into drifting?
Ken Gushi: Before I started drifting, knew what it was. “thought it was just a couple kids in japan sliding their cars around” – at that time, I was 8 or 9ish – I was always into skylines, supras, wangan racing, 800 HP cars. Drifting was boring, sliding your car around a turn, anyone can do that.

Then when I was 12 or 13, saw initial D for the first time, also had seen a lot of real drifting on option video. My friend was like “you should watch this, it’s pretty cool.” He told me that it was about a corolla that beats everyone.There’s a black GTR in ID, and right when I started watching Initial D, we saw the corolla beat the skyline, and we were thinking “WHAT? That’s not real. There’s no corolla that can beat a skyline.” So that’s when I started to realize what drifting was, maybe it wasn’t as easy as I thought. I got started at this dry lake. My friend took us to this one dry lake in El Mirage, it’s about halfway to Vegas (from LA) near Barstow. He rode motorcycles, so he knew about a lot of offroad trails. We took my dad’s 86 Corolla out there, the same corolla that was in the anime series, and he was showing me how to drift around the bushes. I didn’t know he knew how to drift, but apparently he knew how to drift in Japan right before we moved out here. So he taught me how to do basic car control, sliding around the bush. We setup a couple of cones and made a little track, to see who could drift around it the best. A couple of his employees started getting into it, so they all bought employees. At one point there’s a picture of my dad’s shop that’s all corollas. Our customers, all the employees, there wasn’t a single car in the shop that wasn’t a corolla.

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