Joined
·
10,831 Posts
Samuel Hübinette, aka The Crazy Swede, is a professional race car driver and Hollywood stunt driver. He was born in Jokkmokk, Sweden and started working as a test driver for Volvo Cars. Today he is one of the top names in drifting, winning the inaugural Formula D series championship in 2004 and 2006. Samuel Hubinette's Dodge Charger SRT8 barks to life and settles into a snarling supercharged idle. It's a wicked-looking car with a huge grille and thick, hulking shoulders. It's also big enough to have given birth to the Toyota Corollas and Nissan Silvias it competes against. A linebacker among drifting ballerinas. This crazy Swede has the most wins in Formula DRIFT history.
Born and raised in Jokkmokk close to the Artic Circle in the Sweden. Controlling a car while sliding on ice and snow is something his father taught him at a young age. When he was eight years old he started to slide cars around on the Artic frozen lakes. Since the country was covered in snow eight months of the year, drifting became second nature.
By the time he was 16 he had my first competition in Rally Cross in Sweden. By age 23 he was working as a Test Driver at Volvo Cars. During that period he became their stunt driver for all new Volvo commercials and he also begun competing in Touring Car Racing for Team TDR. He worked at Volvo for nine years until he set his sights on America. He came to Newport Beach, California in 1998 to hang out for a year. While there, he went to a driving event for BMW where he was able to compete in 330s and ended up winning over some of the instructors. However, without a green card, he returned to Sweden and hoped to make it back to Newport Beach one day. Some would call it luck, others would call it Gods blessing, but he won the Green Card lottery! He jumped on the next flight.
After a couple years working as a driving instructor with Skip Barber and many driving/racing gigs, including starting his own racing school, he landed the best deal he could imagine - Drifting for Mopar in the Dodge Viper. It just so happens that he signed this deal on April 1st. But, April Fools Day or not, he went on to win the first Drifting competition at Road Atlanta and also the Championship 2004. The season 2005 was also a great year finishing 2nd overall.
He had a great 2006 season and you can see all the championship stops and results. The season was not only great because he finished number one, but also because everybody involved was doing a great job, including the car that was just a great ride. As it's not easy beating the rest of the guys in the Formula D.
In 2007 they introduced the 2007 Dodge Charger SRT-8 and had a successful year with one first place finish and 5th over all. It was the heaviest car in the circuit and many people did not think it was going to do that well as it did. The car with a set of BF Goodrich KDW 335s ended up being a very competitive car. At 200 inches long, the Charger stretches more than 2 feet longer than the stiletto-sleek Viper Hubinette used to win the 2006 Formula Drift series championship and an amazing 3.5 feet longer than the Pontiac Solstice GXP run by Hubinette's archrival Rhys Millen during the 2007 Formula Drift season. But it's not just big; it's thick. A stock Charger R/T weighs in at a thick 4,085 pounds. That's about a half ton more than most drift machines and an absolutely agonizing amount of metal to heave sideways around a racetrack. "The size is a disadvantage," says Hubinette in a voice that mixes high-energy enthusiasm with his Swedish accent. "The more mass you have, the more the car will want to come out of the corner and push out of the line the judges are looking for. The car was good at low speeds, but higher-speed drifts needed work."
