Travis Pastrana

Drift legend · USA

Travis Pastrana drifting the Vermont SportsCar Subaru WRX at Formula Drift

Rally instincts, drift surface.

The rallycross / rally / Gymkhana icon who crossed into Formula Drift in a Subaru WRX. Different driving language, different chassis discipline, the crossover that mapped the rally paddock's weight-transfer instincts onto judged drift.

Pastrana spent two decades as the visible face of American rallycross and rally, multiple X Games golds in the Subaru WRX STI, Gymkhana entries with Hoonigan, the kind of CV that defined a different motorsport vocabulary from the FD paddock. The drift entry was deliberate: Vermont SportsCar (his own race team) built a Formula Drift-spec Subaru WRX, and Pastrana ran it on the 2022 and 2023 FD seasons.

The cars look like the Subaru rally programme stretched into a drift chassis, wide arches, Subaru livery, all-wheel-drive heritage recast as rear-wheel-drive drift. The driving identity stayed Subaru-coded: weight transfer over angle theatre, scandi-flick instincts on entries, the read of a driver whose home discipline judged a different metric.

The cultural function is bridge work. Before Pastrana, the rally and drift paddocks shared only Ken Block; after him, the Subaru identity has a visible drift line too. A grid raised on FD now reads "Subaru" as a chassis they can take seriously, not just a Hoonigan reference.

At a glance

  • Role: Multi-discipline crossover
  • Region: USA

Career highlights

  • 2022: Formula Drift debut, Subaru WRX. Crosses from rally / rallycross into FD with a Vermont SportsCar-built WRX. The first time the Subaru identity sits on an FD grid as a driver programme, not a video segment.
  • 2023: Formula Drift season. Continues the FD season with the WRX programme. The car remains the only Subaru on the FD grid, the visible bridge between two motorsport languages.

Signature cars

Source: Subaru Motorsports USA