The 800 HP Formula Drift K.Sport 350Z - /TUNED

[MUSIC PLAYING] MATT FARAH: [COUGHING]. Oh my god. [COUGHING]. One of my [COUGH] favorite things [COUGHING] in the entire world is shredding tires. [COUGHING]. God. [COUGH]. That's why we've come to the Bondurant School of High Performance Driving [COUGH] in Chandler, Arizona to shred some tires that Hankook has so generously provided us. And if we're going to shred tires here today, we need a proper tire shredding machine. And for that, I have enlisted the help of a friend of mine. His name is Corey, and he drives Formula Drift. And he should be bringing his car into the frame [ENGINE REVVING] right now. That's right. Formula Drift Nissan 350Z Blown LS3 today on "Tuned." Get the hell out of here. [ENGINE REVVING] Whoo! My lungs haven't been the same since. And though I inhaled half a tire for that shot, it was worth it because this purpose-built machine is designed for one thing-- to throw as much smoke as possible. In order to understand the Ksport 350Z, you first have to understand its driver, Corey Hosford. I met Corey when Bob Bondurant encouraged me to have him teach me to drift last year. He, along with his best friend and manager Dustin, are the pinnacle of redneck awesome. This is the kind of guy who wears a pink leisure suit and a *** pack to a nightclub in Vegas, the kind of guy who will grow a mustache and then install a matching mustache on his car. He's the only person I know who makes those things look cool. So of course he has naked zombie girls on the side of his race car. From the orange scheme to the gory portraits to the custom-painted steering wheel, you can tell that Corey doesn't take things too seriously. Every T-shirt he owns has a print of his own face on it-- in a wig. The only thing Corey does take seriously is his driving. The car's battle scars tell the story. This man goes all out. COREY HOSFORD: It's a 240, and moved into a different platform that we felt was going to work better than what we had prior to this. And we made quite a bit of different changes to power plant, transmission, just to change for the level of driving that we're in now. Obviously, we're running in the Formula Drift series, so we had to step our game up quite a bit. MATT FARAH: So what's under the hood? COREY HOSFORD: So we're running a LS3-based block with a Magnuson supercharger. It makes about 800 horsepower. MATT FARAH: And what's the car weigh? COREY HOSFORD: About 2,800 pounds. MATT FARAH: So good. So it's fast. COREY HOSFORD: Yeah, it's fast. [ENGINE REVVING] MATT FARAH: You've got dual calipers in the rear, right? COREY HOSFORD: Yeah, we're running a separate brake system for the hydraulic hand brake, just so there's no interference with the foot brake and the hydraulic hand brake if they're running on a single system. Ksport's slide control coilovers all the way around the car. We have a couple different spring rates we run depending on which track we're going to. It is a fully built race car. And you'll get every squeak and crack and brake sound, as you would in any other race car. It is built for one reason, and that is for competition. MATT FARAH: Before I attempt to do this and hopefully don't break your car, I think I need you to show me what it looks like when it's done properly. COREY HOSFORD: We can do that. Put you front seat and see what she does. MATT FARAH: Let's go drift. COREY HOSFORD: Let's do it. Ohh! Almost hit me in the nuts. MATT FARAH: [LAUGHS]. Before we hit the track, I got a little bit of warm up on the skid pad, far away from hard things and soft people. Almost. COREY HOSFORD: Like see how the angle works you? It feels like the car snaps with it. MATT FARAH: Yeah, when you get more angle, it snaps for you. Last one. What makes a drift car a drift car as opposed to just a regular track car? COREY HOSFORD: Well, suspension setup is a big part of this. We run quite a bit of a reverse rake in the car to get a lot more rear grip. And a lot of people think, drift car, you want to set it up loose, but this thing is set up extremely tight. And the reason you do that is when you're sliding at angle, you want to be able to get forward momentum. If you don't have that setup, you're just going to be sitting there smoking your tires, and not going anywhere. So we set the suspension up purposely to get grip at angle. So we added a lot of reverse rake, and also the steering geometry. We have a Parts Shop MAX steering angle kit that'll let us go about 56, 57 degrees of steering angle when you're at full lock, and that's a big part of it. MATT FARAH: At that point, it feels like you're almost going backwards, doesn't it? COREY HOSFORD: Oh yeah. If you really wanted to, you can hook this thing and enter backwards. And that's a big part of it is you got to get that style points but have the acumen and the angle to work together so you don't run out of room. MATT FARAH: After a year of attempting to drift street cars, I finally got to learn what a proper drift car with a hydraulic hand brake can do. A street car is front-wheel drive compared to this. By using the hand brake to initiate a slide, which I had never done, I was able to start the drift much, much earlier. I could tell you I drifted perfectly all day, but that would be a lie. Instead, I'll tell you I learned a very valuable lesson. When you think you might lose it, don't try to be a hero and keep it going, or else this might happen. Sorry. I'm sorry. I went through three sets of tires during the day, and one scary spin aside, I honestly feel I've had an experience unlike any other. Compared to this purpose-built machine, drifting a street car is like trying to row a boat across a baseball field. The hand brake, the instantaneous torque, the steering angle all make you able to do things with the car that just aren't possible in a street car. And the accompanying soundtrack is intoxicating. [ENGINE NOISES] MATT FARAH: Then Corey stepped in to show me, and more importantly, you, how the pros get it done with two absolutely flawless runs. I say this often, and I'll say it again-- drifting is like golf. It takes simultaneously both a heavy hand and a light touch. Some people think it's stupid, but the people who are into it all like to tell you how good at it they are. And the professionals like Corey, Chris Harris, and others make it look really easy. But the truth is that drifting consistently, like shooting a good score in golf, can be very, very difficult, even for a good driver. Most importantly, the skills needed for either a quality golf game or to become a great drifter are the same, years of practice, lots of money, and a great big bag of balls. You're watching an intro where Corey does a brake stand, and I come out of a cloud of smoke. But we don't know which way the wind is going, and there's only one way to test that. [MUSIC PLAYING]