Switching disciplines for fun or new experiences is common among drivers, and often it ends up being a one-off. But Teemu Asunmaa, a very famous and fast rally driver with 4 Finnish rally championships under his belt, took the plunge into drifting in a completely different way. After a few tests, he even bought a BMW E46 and started to build a drift car himself.
Two years ago, I attended a drift event for the first time as a spectator. Then I thought about testing a drift car. Later, in the 2023 season, I had the opportunity to test a real drift car one day. That experience was very, very nice. After that, everything just started to happen and at the end of 2024 I bought a BMW E46 and started to completely rebuild the car. Now the car is finished.
As Teemu Asunmaa is a longtime friend of Samsonas Motorsport, it is no coincidence that Teemu’s BMW E46 has been upgraded with the Samsonas Motorsport H-Pattern Dogbox and a quite new member of the Samsonas Motorsport production family – the drift dampers. It seems that everything worked very well.
The dampers work perfectly, but we are always testing and trying to develop something new. Different drift events require different setup, and different weather conditions and tyres also require different setup. We need to try to understand more about drifting and find out what kind of setup is perfect. But overall Samsonas dampers work on a completely different level when you compare them to my later dampers.
And how was it? How did the multiple Finnish rally champion look in Round 1 of the Finnish Pro Drifting Championship? Among some of the best Finnish drifters? He won the qualifying and collected an outstanding 95 points, and yeah… He won the whole event and is now the leader of the Finnish Pro Drifting Championship. Simple as that. But for Teemu, it was quite an experience to understand and get used to drifting, as he comes from a completely different motorsport background, which is rallying.
After 18 years of rally experience, drifting is very difficult to understand. But I’m still a bit surprised at how difficult drifting is. The bigger problems for me are when you drive a drift car, you don’t use the steering wheel as much. I mean you use it much less. The steering of a drift car is completely different, and you just let go of the steering wheel and stop it, and sometimes you turn a little bit. When you’re rallying, you use the steering all the time and you never let your hand off the wheel.
It seems that this venture is far from over, because Teemu is even skipping the next round of the Finnish Rally Championship in Turku this weekend because he has more drifting plans. And don’t think that you will only see Teemu drifting in the national field. He will debut at the 3rd round of the Drift Masters in Finland as a wildcard entry. We’ve seen Teemu in WRC Finland, now the same, only in drift. We can hardly wait for this spectacle. And what about his car? Pretty serious
BMW E46 with M50B28 engine, producing 800HP and 890NM. Samsonas Motorsport H-Pattern Dogbox and drift dampers, Winters differential, Alcon brakes, MaxxEcu engine control, PDM, and wiring. Weight – 1070 kilograms.
Photo courtesy – Loud Life Media