Brutskiy Takes a Third PROSPEC Title as Formula DRIFT Returns to Las Vegas After 14 Years

Dmitriy Brutskiy won the 2026 Formula DRIFT PROSPEC championship at The Bullring at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on the weekend of 24–26 September, and he did it from the sidelines. Round 7 of the PRO season doubled as the fourth and final PROSPEC round, and the junior title was settled not by a run but by a repair that couldn't be made in time.

"I got distracted by the news and lost the heat. I may also have blown my engine doing donuts afterwards!" — Dmitriy Brutskiy, Formula DRIFT

Brutskiy arrived with a seven-point cushion over rookie Jason Webb, the South African in the NonStopTuning / Webb 45 Racing Ford Mustang, and a ten-point margin over 15-year-old Camren Sorensen, who was chasing the record as the youngest champion the series has ever crowned. Sorensen's run ended in the Top 16 against 16-year-old rookie Braden Lons. Webb's ended in the pit lane: his team couldn't repair front suspension damage before his Top 8 heat against Kasey Kohl, and he withdrew. "It sucks to go out this way, but that's racing," Webb said. With nobody left who could out-score him, Brutskiy was declared champion on the spot. He then went out and lost his own Top 8 heat to Dustyn Farrell, finishing sixth on the night with 20 points. Final standings: Brutskiy 130, Webb 123, Lons 112, Sorensen 110.

Formula DRIFT billed it as the first three-time PROSPEC championship in series history, and the record is real — but the label has been retrofitted. Brutskiy's first title, in 2020, was won in what was then called the Link ECU PRO2 Championship; the class was rebranded PROSPEC for the 2021 season, which he also won. FD's own driver profile still words it carefully as "Two time FD PRO2 and PROSPEC Champion." Three titles in the same ladder class, then, under two different names.

The car is a #85 2006 BMW M3 — an E46, running the factory S54 straight-six, on GT Radial tires and wearing the Never Settle livery it has carried for years. Brutskiy had already cashed in his PRO license and raced in the top class in 2024 and 2025 before coming back down to PROSPEC for this season, which makes the third title read less like a graduation and more like a deliberate return to a class he knows how to win. It nearly didn't survive the weekend. "Coming into Las Vegas my son had used the car for a Pro-Am event and as the track temperature rose this weekend, I cut short my practice because I felt the car was on the way out," he said. "I was hoping it would survive long enough to get me the Championship." He expects to be racing his son in PROSPEC next year.

The round itself went to Lons, whose Lons Motorsports Nissan S13 beat Kohl's Mspek Race to Reef Nissan 240SX in a final the judges split. It was the teenager's first Formula DRIFT win, and the 50 points lifted him from sixth in the championship to third by a two-point margin over Camren Sorensen — which matters more than a trophy, because the top three PROSPEC finishers earn an automatic PRO license for next season. Sorensen's ninth-place finish on the night cost him that. Farrell took third at the event, his first PROSPEC podium.

The venue is the other half of the story. Formula DRIFT last ran at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2012, on a temporary course laid out in a parking lot; FD's recap dates that era to 2008–2012 while its own 2026 schedule announcement says 2009, so take the start year loosely. The return is a different proposition — a three-year commitment to The Bullring, the quarter-mile oval inside the LVMS campus, with new pavement laid specifically to suit drifting and infrastructure work aimed at teams and spectators rather than a repurposed car park. Series president Ryan Sage put attendance at "more than 10,000 people," which is a credible number for a first year back and a reasonable justification for the capital.

In PRO, the weekend turned on a mechanical failure of its own. James Deane came in leading the championship by five points and watched his O'Reilly / Pennzoil Ford Mustang RTR Spec 5-FD get towed back to the pits with an engine problem he said was his first since joining the team. He left Las Vegas 47 points adrift. He wasn't alone: Aurimas "Odi" Bakchis was eliminated after a restart he never saw — he hit the back of Shinji Minowa's GT86 when Minowa braked, and his Subaru BRZ then dumped its oil on the track returning to the line, ending both his night and his title hopes. Fredric Aasbo lost in the Top 32 to Andy Hateley's E46 BMW and mathematically lost any shot at a fourth crown.

That cleared the way for Conor Shanahan, who qualified second at 91.03 behind hometown driver Branden Sorensen's 91.4 and then went through the bracket without a stumble. The final against Matt Field's Borla / GT Radial / Heat Wave Visual / Logitech / Liqui Moly Corvette was the best drifting of the night by the series' own telemetry — both cars averaging two to three feet of proximity across their runs under the Universal Drift Scoring Method — and the judges gave it to Shanahan unanimously. His Red Bull / GT Radial / JYR Toyota GT86 banked 53 points for the weekend, 50 for the win plus the qualifying bonus, and he left in front with 212.

That is a 47-point lead with one round to go, and it is not a championship yet. Deane sits on 165, Branden Sorensen 164, Jack Shanahan 162, and with a maximum of 53 points available at a single event, all three are still mathematically alive. Formula DRIFT's own reading is blunt: if Conor wins a single heat at the finale, the title is his. The last stop is the Shoreline Showdown at Long Beach on 23–24 October, the first standalone night round FD has run there. One small caveat on the numbers — FD's written recap credits Branden Sorensen with three qualifying points and Conor Shanahan with two, while the results table on the same page shows +4 and +3. The table is the one that reconciles with the published totals, so that's what the figures above use.