Matt Field Won Adam LZ's Party

There is a particular kind of risk in putting your own name on an event. If it goes badly you own that too, and if it goes well you still have to drive. Adam LZ took both halves of that deal at Castle Combe on 4–5 September, and the weekend split cleanly down the middle: the event was the biggest thing of its kind the Wiltshire circuit has run, and he was out of his own competition before the quarter-finals.

Castle Combe reported more than 12,000 people through the gates across the two days. That is a meaningful number for a UK drift event, and it is the second data point in what now looks like a trend rather than a one-off. The LZ World Tour — run by Adam LZ's Florida-based LZMFG alongside the Irish team Drift Games — brought its European leg to Castle Combe for the first time on 27 September 2025, a single Saturday built around a Top 24 bracket that Archie Hammer-Harmer won ahead of Conor Falvey and Christian Brunberg. A year later the same event needed two days.

Friday was qualifying, and the sheet at the top was tight. Martin Richards put his Driftworks R32 Skyline on a 98.33, and Matt Field matched the number in the mid-engined, Borla-liveried C8 Corvette that Castle Combe's report lists at 1,000 horsepower. Behind them came Lwi Edwards, Steve 'Baggsy' Biagioni, George Barclay and Conor Falvey, all inside five points of the leaders.

Adam LZ's Friday was more eventful than the final number suggests. His first run put four wheels off the circuit and scored three points — effectively a zero, on a day where everything above 94 was in the conversation. He came back out and put down a 96.67 to qualify third, which is the sort of recovery run that usually sets up a story about a home-event victory.

It did not. In Saturday's Round of 16 he drew Jake Crouch, the eleventh qualifier, and Crouch beat him in an S15 to knock the host out of his own event. Crouch kept going, too — all the way to the Final Four alongside Ryan Hughes, Oliver Evans and Matt Field. Field took the win over Evans in the final, with Crouch third and Hughes fourth.

That Field won on debut here is less of an upset than the bracket makes it look. He is a Formula DRIFT regular and he arrived with one of the more unusual cars in the paddock — a mid-engined C8 Corvette, a platform that is not obviously suited to a discipline built on long, sustained rear-wheel slip angles. It qualified joint-fastest and it won.

The format itself does some work in making weekends like this watchable. Alongside the main bracket, the LZ World Tour runs a Last Chance competition that pulls drivers back in from outside the qualifying cut — Haydn Cruickshank, Shane Faber and Huw Savill all came through it at Castle Combe from 21st, 15th and 16th respectively. Everyone ran the same supplied Accelera 651 tyre from Tire Streets, which removes the rubber as a variable and makes the judging — handled by Mark 'Sweeps' Buckle, Rich Newton and Lee Barker — a comparison of driving rather than of budgets.

Around the competition sat the parts of the weekend that explain the 12,000 figure better than the bracket does: a Griot's Garage car show, a trade village, fantasy battles and demo runs, and James Deane on track in an S14A. Castle Combe's preview had also billed Adam LZ's big-block F22 BMW as making the trip — the BMW 2 Series shell with a naturally aspirated big-block Chevrolet V8 in it, which HotCars reported in June 2025 as a 10.3-litre engine making 1,125 horsepower and 931 lb-ft. The circuit's own results report does not say which car he qualified in.

The question Castle Combe posed in its write-up was whether the UK can support drifting at this scale, and the honest answer from the weekend is that the appetite is there. The event doubled its running time in its second year and filled it. The man who built it just did not get to finish the weekend driving.