So… Much… Fun!

The unmistakable roar of a supercharged HEMI^® engine echoes across the infield road course at Texas Motor Speedway. Heavy smoke flows from the rear tires of an SRT^® Hellcat Redeye Charger as it transitions smoothly from one corner to the next, its widebody stance and 800+ horsepower working in perfect harmony. Behind the wheel sits Adam Comeaux, an Army veteran from Tennessee who’s discovered that the real thrill of owning an SRT Hellcat isn’t just the straight-line speed – it’s learning to keep all that power underneath you while you’re sideways and smiling.

Adam turned the keys over for charity thrill rides and I’m about to experience the infield road course looking out the side windows for the first time. “You can feel the momentum,” Jamal Dieb, my pilot for today’s sideways activity, says, still grinning after a session on the drift course. “When it transitions from left to right, it’s a lot of mass. But man, when you get it right, when you actually link everything together, it’s just pure joy.” Sidenote: Jamal is the real deal. The man can WHEEL!!!

This is Comeaux’s third drift event, and he’s come a long way from his first tentative slides at last year’s Mopar_® Heaven. That initial experience was equal parts terrifying and addictive – the moment when he realized his SRT Hellcat was capable of so much more than he’d imagined. Today, with professional drift instructors from Urban Racing guiding participants, he’s part of a growing movement of Mopar owners discovering the sideways life.

Comeaux’s journey to becoming a drift enthusiast wasn’t exactly conventional. He didn’t grow up in a car family, but he caught the bug early with a 2008 WRX STI in high school. A friend’s father, a lawyer who always drove the latest and greatest Mopar vehicle, introduced him to the world of American V8s. In 2008, that meant an introduction to muscle car goodness in the passenger seat of an SRT8, and Comeaux was hooked.

“V8s, you know, this is it,” he recalls of those early rides. “It’s pretty cool.”

His first Mopar vehicle came in 2019 after returning from deployment in Iraq – a 2018 Daytona R/T that he used for Turo rentals. That car would inadvertently set him on the path to his current SRT Hellcat after it was stolen. When his insurance company offered to make things right, Comeaux didn’t hesitate: “I’ll go order a Hellcat, I guess.”

But owning an SRT Hellcat brought new challenges. When his Redeye Charger widebody was stolen at a Mopar event in Dallas in 2021, it sparked something unexpected – not just frustration, but innovation. Together with Eric Bankston of Destroyer 1320, Comeaux helped develop theft deterrent products for modern Mopar vehicles. Today, they’ve protected approximately 25,500 Mopar vehicles with their solutions, but Comeaux is quick to pivot the conversation back to what really lights him up: driving.

Drag racing was the natural first step – Comeaux frequently visited Bowling Green and Beach Bend near his Nashville home. But there’s only so much a quarter-mile can teach you about a car’s capabilities. The road course at the National Corvette Museum beckoned, and eventually, so did drifting.

“It was like, okay, obviously drag race, right?” Comeaux explains. “But I’d had the Hellcats for a few years. I needed something more.”

Last year’s Mopar Heaven provided the revelation. Comeaux signed up for an instructor-led drift session with Urban Racing, bringing his own SRT Hellcat loaded down with spare tires and equipment – so loaded, in fact, that on the drive back to the hotel one night, Fort Worth police mistook him for a street racer.

“The sergeant comes up and goes, ‘Did you win?'” Comeaux laughs. “And I was like, ‘Well, I was drifting today, so I don’t really know how to win. We didn’t crash. We had fun. I guess that is winning.”

The officer asked about racing a Supra, but Comeaux’s earnest confusion was genuine. “Sir, I honestly don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I have my dinner on the passenger seat. I have a thousand pounds of gear. I have bald tires on the back from drifting all day. There is no way I could have raced whoever you’re saying.” They let him go, wrong SRT Hellcat entirely.

The first drift day was humbling. Comeaux went from total noob to learning to handle each corner individually. But linking corners together? That proved far more challenging than he anticipated. “It’s the linking corners together that is my next step,” he admits. “I can link two corners together. Three is very hard.”

A breakthrough came when he swallowed his pride and handed the keys to Jamal, one of Urban Racing’s instructors. “I was able to get one corner, and then I just couldn’t get the transition right,” Comeaux recalls. “I was like, dude, please just show me. He said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘I’m just gonna be doing this all day, so I need you to show me how to link it.'”

Jamal’s response was modest: “Don’t judge me too hard. I’ve never driven a Hellcat before.” Of course, he then seamlessly linked every corner, narrating his inputs as he went – when he was on the throttle, when he was braking, and how he was manipulating weight transfer with his feet and hands.

“That’s the thing I couldn’t see, you know,” Comeaux says. “I can hear he’s not on the throttle, but is he braking, or is he just letting it go? And if he’s braking, how much? The pressure, the weight transfer, where you come off the brake pedal – do you come off smooth? Do you snap off? That’s where it clicks.” Drifting is a game of feel. It takes a ton of seat time to know exactly what inputs the car wants to keep things sideways and smoke rolling off the tires from corner to corner.

The car itself has evolved alongside Comeaux’s skills. Last year, just a week before Mopar Heaven, he had Franklin Chrysler Dodge Jeep_® Ram install the Direct Connection Stage 2 kit, bumping power to 837 horsepower on pump gas with a 100-octane tune available at the push of a button. The kit’s transmission tuning proved especially valuable for getting and staying sideways. “The transmission has been snappier,” Comeaux notes. “It just knows where to be.”

Tire selection became an art form. For these events, Comeaux hunts Facebook Marketplace for half-price takeoffs – 500-treadwear all-seasons are magical for getting the car to step out and stay out. They’re perfect for drifting: the right treadwear to be smoky, they last more than a lap, and they typically don’t delaminate with a bang.

“A lot of people will say if you’re going to be drifting the car, use these,” he explains. “I drifted the entire day last year on a set of not-new Pirellis, then drove 700 miles back to Tennessee on the same tires.”

The next evolution involves coilovers to solve recurring adaptive damping codes, an angle kit and a hydraulic handbrake. “We’re hoping AAD is going to come out with their angle kit,” Comeaux says. (AAD has released this kit, and it is EPIC.) “Maybe next year we can go do the entire big course at Texas Motor Speedway. That would be the goal.”

Comeaux has found a welcoming community in drifting and high-performance driving events. At this year’s Mopar Heaven, he and the Urban Racing team have given over 100 ride-alongs, putting people in the passenger seat to experience what a properly driven SRT Hellcat can do.

“I definitely like the instructor-led events,” Comeaux reflects. “I didn’t really know there was so much support and Community behind drifting. I don’t want to just bash my head into a wall. I want to learn.”

He’s already eyeing more opportunities, including Chin Track Days at Barber Motorsports Park and the growing drift scene at Mid Pond near Birmingham. The goal isn’t to become a professional drifter – it’s simpler than that.

“These cars were built to put smiles on your face,” Comeaux says. “It’s cool to get my car used the way it was kind of intended. The SRT design team would be pleased.”

As smoke continues to pour from the SRT Hellcat’s rear tires and Jamal takes another group of wide-eyed enthusiasts on the ride of their lives, Comeaux watches with satisfaction. He’s found his groove in the pure, unfiltered joy of keeping 4,400 pounds of American muscle dancing sideways. And he’s helping others discover that same joy, one smoky lap at a time.

Sometimes, the best way forward is sideways!