Exclusive interview with Formula Drift Pro 1 Driver
Dean Kearney
Photography by Andrew Gates
RUKUS MAGAZINE: Who is Dean Kearney?
DEAN KEARNEY: Who is Dean Kearney, that’s a good question. I’m a 29 year old guy from Ireland and spending probably 75% of my time in the states at the moment that’s chasin’ my dream and driving fast cars and loving every minute of it.
RM: What do you do for work?
DK: This is work, this is what we do, actually we travel around the country, and we run obviously the Formula D National Championship is the backbone of our program, it’s the bread and butter end of it, I’d say. And then we do a lot of international events; Goodwood Festival of Speed, and Gatebil, and some other stuff in Ireland called IDC, and those kind of events, but yeah, this is what we do as a living, literally enough.
RM: How did you discover drifting?
DK: How did I discover drifting…um they held a drift event in Ireland, I think back in 2004, it’s actually a friend of mine now that held the first ever event by the name of Richie Lavin, held an event after seeing all these Option DVDs out of Japan and everyone was like kinda hyped on drifting, so he threw an event and everybody showed up with their street cars, like showed up like on the same size tires with no spare tires, nothing at all, and started doing what they called drifting at the time, I would call it more like donuts or power sliding now, but I attended that event with my older brother and saw it and was like man, this is cool, like this is really cool. So, that was kind of it for like 5 or 6 months, and it was gone quiet, and then a guy by the name of Graham McNamara started up something called D1IRL which turned into Prodrift, and actually became IDC after that, they started holding events and after attending probably two or three events we decided that we would show up and compete and showed up and loved it and just kinda went from there… snowballed.
RM: What was your first impression?
DK: My first impression of drifting was, it was cool obviously, I was fifteen years old so I couldn’t get a driver’s license, but we were probably drifting a while before that, we were driving cars around the farmer’s farmyard. I know it sounds pretty safe, and I probably shouldn’t really be saying it, but that’s what we were doing from ages of probably 12 to 16 or 17, actually when we got our driver’s license. So, we were drifting then and had a good idea of actual car control at that stage, and, so when there was a sport all of a sudden evolving called drifting, it was like, hey man, I want to take part in this it looks fun.
RM: Tell us about your car.
DK: Yeah, this is my 002 chassis. It’s a car that’s been in the making for quite a while actually and it is twin turbo V10 8.3L with direct port nitrous. Has a Speedway quick-change and Samsonas six-speed sequential. We dyno’d it before we came here last week, we don’t actually have a proper figure on the power yet, because at 3000 RPM it made 900 HP/ 875 ft lb. torque with no nitrous and then shut down the dyno. We don’t have a proper figure, but doing all the math and the estimation of it and stuff how it is before the nitrous at the moment, we’re talking around 1250-1300 horsepower.
RM: When did you know you wanted to be a professional drifter?
DK: I wouldn’t say there was a time I ever decided that I wanted to be a professional drifter, I think as a kid being a boy into cars I always had this what I would have considered a fairytale kind of a dream of being a professional racing driver, so I never thought it was a real life option. We start doing drifting and the sport, I suppose we were lucky we were there when the sport started kind of getting bigger and we just had to ride the curve with it. And it was probably 2008-2009 when we started to realize, like hey, this is actually real life and we can actually make this happen if we all work on it and pull in the same direction we can turn it into a living, so probably around that time ’08-’09.
RM: Tell us about the moment you won your FD license; Feeling? Where? When?
DK: When I got my Formula D license, I was in the runnings to have a spot at the Red Bull Drifting World Championships in ’08 and they were giving out 2 licenses in Europe at the time. It was James Deane got one another good friend of mine, Eric O’sullivan actually got the second one and I was in third place, we miss out barely. But, we came over from Ireland a big gang of us came over to support these guys and whatever, we landed here in November 2008 saw the event then I was in the paddock maybe 10 minutes and I decided this is it, I’m coming here next year, that’s it, and speaking away with all my friends they like you’re crazy, it’s a massive step and I was like, I’m telling ya, this is where we’re coming. So, we came out we done Irwindale 2009 after winning the Prodrift European Championship at the time and that gave us our license, so that’s where it started from.
RM: Did you ever imagine yourself being in the sport for this long?
DK: Yes, I definitely thought I would be in drifting for… I don’t see a timeline, cause it’s not a sport you have to be super fit or whatever… it is good, and obviously it does help. But, age in this sport doesn’t really matter and the older I know you get, you mature as a driver and you start actually learning more. So, you see people like Vaughn, and Chris that are like five, six, I don’t know eight years older than me, maybe. And they’re like… they get better every year, they’re like fine wine or whatever, they just get stronger and stronger every year. So, I don‘t see a time limit in drifting, but I know I’m going to be sticking around for definitely a couple more years at least.
RM: What does life look like after drifting?
DK: I will consider myself to always be involved someway in motorsports on what level I don’t really know, I’d like to maybe own a team and have maybe two or three drivers driving under me and be able to share obviously my knowledge with them and what it took to come up along the ranks and building a team. But, I do have a massive interest in construction as well, actually, it’s definitely a passion of mine that’s what my family over home do is construction, so that’s probably something I will dabble in at some stage in my life.
RM: If you hadn’t discovered drifting what might you be doing?
DK: Probably working a 9-5 job in construction, maybe. No… I would have… I was always keen on WRC stage rally, that kind of stuff, so that was always my first goal, and passion was that kind of level. Getting involved like in rallying at a 1600 level and try and actually work up from there. But, as everyone knows rallying is super expensive, and very difficult in National Championships if you were to try and get any financial support to try and do it on a professional level, so I maybe would’ve dabbled around in rallying on kind of a more grassroots kind of a level, maybe.
RM: Anyone out there you’d like to thank?
DK: There are so many sponsors, and partners, and friends, and family that were involved in this program, so I don’t have all night just to be naming them all out, but they’ve all been a massive influence on the program, they’ve helped out so much. There’s guys obviously like Bryan Bridges, and Alex, and Brandon, and Dan and my little brother Emmet himself who’s been hands-on with the program from the very start and helped to actually make this car, so they’ve been a fantastic edition and they’ve like all the way through [from the beginning]. Yeah, I definitely like to say thanks to them. I like obviously to say thanks to Oracle Lighting, Achilles Radial, 360 Wraps, Ravenol, Link, HPS… there’s so many sponsors, I’m going to let somebody out, so, yeah I’d just like to thank obviously all the sponsors. RM