The Swedish Drift Championship was actually supposed to start at the Bilsport show at Easter but due to it snowing around 10cm a few days before, they decided to not have that event count, instead the start of the championship was at Mantorp park 27-28 April, and I was there to document it for you.

SDC runs in two different classes, SM and RM where SM is supposed to be our top pro drivers and RM being a lighter class with tire regulations and drivers with a bit less experience, but in this article i will focus on the SM series only.

We started on friday with practice and qualification, a lot of the drivers had troubles getting the track right.
This was the first time that this part of Mantorp was used for a drifting competition.

In my opinion this part of the track was a lot more fun to both shoot and watch drifting on than the part of Mantorp we usually see drifting comps on, it would be fun if they held the Gatebil competitions here in June too.

During practice and the first half of the SM qualification the sun was out and the track was dry, for the second half there was a small rain shower that made it even harder for the drivers to find the right speed and line to qualify. That resulted in a lot of zeros and that we only had enough drivers to do a Top 16 on Saturday.

During the Top 16 and finals on saturday it constantly rained, I kind of feel it was a good thing because it evened the playfield a bit when all of the drivers had pretty much the same amount of grip during the battles and the hp did not really matter, now it was all about keeping the right line and getting out to those clipping points without overdoing it and ending up in the sandbox, which a few drivers did but thankfully there was no serious damage to the cars.

As you could imagine there is at least one old Volvo driving the series, the 245 driven by Jocke Grahn is a real monster that manage to keep up with the more modern chassis in the series.

Even with the lack of smoke and speed the drivers managed to keep it interesting for the people watching.

The finals was between Pawel Korpulinski (Bmw 1M)  and Jim Olofsson (Bmw E30) where Pawel walked out as the winner after an exciting battle.  

The next round of SDC is held at the parking lot of “Skara sommarland” June 29-30 an event I really look forward to shooting, there will be a lot of concrete walls and awesome driving and hopefully the Swedish summer has arrived by then!

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This was my first time writing an article in English, i really hope you guys enjoyed it!
You can check out more of my work on: Facebook.com/pontusbfoto or instagram.com/Pontusblomqvistfoto

Here are some bonus photos: