apexmasters.com

Drifting in Türkiye began with a school in 2007 and grew into a championship broadcast live on national television, drawing tens of thousands of spectators per event. But the memory of those fifteen years was scattered: an old website, the federation’s result sheets, PDF score tables, news archives, photo folders and whatever people still remembered. There was no single place to follow a driver’s career, see every race ever held at a circuit, or find the events a photographer had covered over the years.

That is why I built apexmasters.com: to gather in one trustworthy source how the drift community came together, the obstacles it overcame, and the organizations, work and events it has left behind.

What’s inside?

• Every result and bracket: 15 seasons and 62 rounds from 2011 to 2026, across the Türkiye Drift Championship (TDŞ) and the TOSFED Drift Cup (TDK). Qualifying runs, every battle from the Top 32 to the final, final classifications, round points and season standings for each event.
• Drivers: 146 driver profiles with career history, teams, cars, season-by-season results and podium statistics.
• The people behind it: Drifting is not only about drivers. Judges, spotters, photographers, videographers, drone operators, instructors, mechanics, organizers and tuners each have their own page, along with the role they played at every event.
• Cars: 93 competition cars, with technical specs from engine, turbo, gearbox and differential down to suspension, brakes and safety equipment. Each car’s changes over the years and an itemized parts list.
• Teams, circuits and schools: Founding and disbanding years, rosters, track layouts and every race held at each venue.
• News and culture: 136 articles in Turkish and English, race previews and recaps, a press archive, a 69-term drift glossary and a timeline of drift history.
• Two languages: The whole site is available in Turkish and English, at separate addresses.

How does it work?

From the outside, apexmasters.com is a fast, clean, static website. Behind it is a data system I designed from the ground up.

Everything lives in a relational database with 89 tables, built on Django. The core idea: every person, car, team and circuit is recorded once, then linked to races, seasons and teams through a role. Assign a photographer to a race and that race shows up automatically on the photographer’s page and in the race’s crew list. Information isn’t copied; it’s connected.

As data comes in, the site calculates itself:

• Registering a driver for a race opens a qualifying entry. Entering the scores creates the results table.
• Entering the final positions automatically updates the driver’s podium statistics, achievements list, the running standings, team points and the winners on the home page.
• Points follow the federation’s official scale: qualifying points plus race points. Team points are the points the drivers bring in, averaged over the roster registered at the start of the season.
• Achievements aren’t written by hand; they’re derived from results, and even the series name matches the era. A 2011 win reads “Landirenzo Drift Challenge”, a 2014 one “APEXMASTERS Türkiye Drift Serisi”.
• Race names are generated from the series, round and circuit. On Turkish pages “Round 3” automatically becomes “3. AYAK”.
• Four sizes of every uploaded image are generated automatically.

When publishing, the system renders every page to HTML: 1,371 pages in Turkish and English. No database or application runs on the live server; visitors only receive ready-made pages. That keeps the site very fast and secure, while content is managed with all the comfort of a real database. Before every release, an automated check makes sure that bugs seen in the past don’t come back.

A few supporting systems sit around the site:

• Ticketing: QR-coded digital tickets delivered by email, managed per race.
• Driver and media information forms: Personal links, pre-filled with what the site already knows, with data-protection (KVKK) consent.
• Live scoring infrastructure: A separate system for race day, where three judges score from tablets and the average and the ranking are calculated instantly.

Challenges

The hardest part wasn’t the code, it was getting the data right. I checked fifteen years of results against the official tables one by one, reported every mismatch and didn’t change any standings until they were confirmed. Some details I only learned once I was deep in it. A struck-through score in the official table doesn’t mean “cancelled”, it means “doesn’t count toward the season”. Team points must round halves up, while the programming language’s default rounding turns 10.5 into 10. One older season was rebuilt by working backwards from the points in the official table.

There was plenty to learn on the technical side too: making Turkish characters behave correctly in sorting, capital letters and URLs; hundreds of redirects so the old site’s search traffic wasn’t lost; running search and filters in the browser on a static site. I wrote every decision and every bug down in numbered documents. Today the project carries its own memory in 22 decision records.

Built with AI

Almost all of this system’s code was written by AI: Cursor and ChatGPT in its first year in 2025, and Claude Code from 2026 on. My role was to define the idea, the structure and the accuracy of the data, gather the content, make every decision and review the result. The AI’s role was to turn all of that into code, documentation and the repetitive work. For me, apexmasters.com is the biggest example of what a motorsport enthusiast can build with AI.

Short timeline

Date
May 2025	The foundation of the data system. Driver, race, circuit, team, car, bracket and people models built in the first two weeks.
June–July 2025	Points structure, Turkish content, car catalogue, tuners, media crews, track layouts
April 2026	Launch preparation, translations, migrating the old site’s content
1 May 2026	The new apexmasters.com goes live
May–August 2026	Ticketing, data-driven home page, search, redirects from old addresses, data protection and backups
October 2026	A redesign of every page, official points rules, automatic achievements, driver forms, car periods and parts lists

By the numbers

Seasons	15 (2011–2026)
Rounds	62
Bracket battles	752
Drivers	146
Judges, media and crew	46 people
Cars	93
Teams	23
Articles	136 (TR/EN)
Pages	1,371