LS Fest West 2022: Stuntwoman and Formula Drift Competitor Zandara Kennedy

04/23/2022

LS Fest West 2022: Stuntwoman and Formula Drift Competitor Zandara Kennedy

04/23/2022

“LS Fest [West] is the first event I ever did in this car, back in 2019,” says Zandara Kennedy of Vancouver, Canada. “It’s kind of the reason that I built the car in the first place. That first event was rough – I snapped axles, I had fuel pressure issues – everything that could go wrong went wrong. But I just loved the vibe, so I decided to go all the way to Kentucky for the second one that year. I really like the energy at LS Fest.”


Kennedy tells us that she doesn’t come from a family of gearheads, and her formative years were actually spent focused on gymnastics and circus performance. “As I got older I started getting interested in doing stunts,” she explains. “I started training to do stunt driving pretty early on and I really liked it, so I bought an old Crown Vic and took it out at night to do dumb stuff with it.”



Over time her skills improved, and as she continued to seek out new challenges to expand her driving skill set, she discovered drifting. She likens it to a cross-training motorsport discipline. “I’d done rally driving and I’ve done grip stuff as well, but once I got in a drift car it just clicked. I was like, ‘oh, I need to do this all the time.’ It’s made me way better at my job. But now I have to work a lot more to pay for the tires and all the stuff that I break!”



She bought this Nissan 350Z in stock form a few years ago and originally intended to keep it that way. “I had a cage put in and it stayed that way for about a year – it was supposed to be a basic practice car. But I kept doing little things to it, and one day guy at the shop I was working with in Montreal was like, ‘Why don’t you LS-swap it?’”


Today she’s campaigning the LS3-powered Z in drift events whenever she gets the chance. “This year is about getting as much seat time as possible,” she says. “And as for the car, it’s probably going to get forced induction soon. There’s something about a supercharged LS that just feels so right.”

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