On a dusty desert track two hours northeast of Los Angeles, Leticia Bufoni found herself in an uncomfortable situation.
The Brazilian skateboarder – that ever performed a trick while jumping out of a plane – is no stranger to an adrenaline rush and has taken up racing himself in recent years. But this was different.
“I wasn’t born to be a passenger seat person,” she told Mail Sport exclusively, after being bounced around by drifter Amanda Sorensen.
‘I’ve been like this all my life. I like to have things under control. And I don’t know why, but every time I get in the passenger seat of a race car, I get really sick.”
Bufoni’s tendency to take the lead goes beyond Sorensen’s aggressive driving.
The six-time X-Games champion arrived in the US from Brazil as a 14-year-old without the comforts of her home country, or even her parents.
Leticia Bufoni recently sat in the passenger seat while drift driver Amanda Sorensen took the wheel
Bufoni has almost 4 million Instagram followers and has lived a remarkable life in the sport
The pair were at Apple Valley Speedway in California, about a two-hour drive from Los Angeles
In other words, she had no choice but to take control of her own life.
“I was alone,” she began. ‘I paid my own bills, I did my own laundry and cooked my own food. And then I think after I moved here, I just had to be in control of everything that was happening in my life.
“…And I think that’s when I really started to get everything under control.”
Bufoni is new Team Ignition showSo it has been an exercise in giving up that kind of control.
In the web series – including this excursion with Sorensen – Bufoni has tried a range of extreme activities and routinely stepped outside her sport with experts in other disciplines.
She has gone shark diving (which she called “terrifying”), base jumping and bouldering (climbing without ropes or harnesses), but this day she came into contact with Sorensen, a 21-year-old Formula DRIFT driver determined to rise in her sport.
The Las Vegas-bred Sorensen has a very different sporting (and life) background than Bufoni.
While the Brazilian has only recently entered racing, Sorensen is a bon vivant on the track and comes from a family of racing drivers.
Karting started at the age of six before her family switched to drifting at the age of 14. Her brother Brandon is also a professional racing driver.
Bufoni, due in 2023, is a six-time X Games champion and competes in the street discipline
Sorensen is one of several extreme sports athletes Bufoni has collaborated with for the series
She called Bufoni a “sister” to her and the pair share a similar tendency to push the boundaries
Bufoni has also taken an interest in driving in recent years and recently signed a contract with Porsche
Yet Sao Paulo-born Bufoni and Sorensen – who calls the older athlete her “sister” – share a kindred spirit and a similar aptitude for risk-taking.
“If I don’t push and challenge myself, I feel like I have no purpose,” Sorensen said.
She later added, “We’re both thrill seekers. We both push each other. We’re very picky, we can see each other’s weaknesses, and we always say, “You know, you could probably do this better.”‘
Bufoni, who also did that donned a wingsuit 40,000 feet in the air for her new show, has a similar kind of curiosity.
“Although I love being a leader, I also love learning new things, and I have met great athletes that I have learned a lot (from),” she said. “And it’s so cool to meet people from different sports that I’ve never met before.”
It’s not surprising that two athletes in extreme sports have a thing for adrenaline rushes. But there’s also a deeper kind of stubbornness they share, one that goes beyond a spike in heart rate.
Sorensen, who has 1.7 million Instagram followers and says she negotiates all her own sponsorship deals (including one with the U.S. Air Force), is gradually trying to chip away at the perception female drivers often have in her male-dominated field.
“I think a lot of drivers can come in and just hang out with their guys and get along with the guys,” she began. ‘Whereas as a woman you have to slowly gain that respect as an individual in sport – you have to be on the box, you have to be on the podium. You have to show that you can go out there and ride as dirty and as hard as they can.”
Sorensen hopes to be a pioneer in her sport and was on the podium this summer
Sorensen, seen second from left during the Extreme E Hydro
Bufoni has undertaken a range of extreme activities for her Team Ignition show, including diving with sharks
Bufoni, meanwhile, signed a racing contract with Porsche this year and has shown her commitment to motorsport by moving outside LA to be closer to this track.
But her grit is perhaps best expressed in the story of her journey to skating.
Years before she topped other competitors at the X-Games, her biggest skating opponent was actually her own father – who was initially a huge skeptic of the sport and cut her board in half when she was just 11 years old. She started setting up a new board the next day and refused his demands to quit.
It took a lot of convincing to show him that skating was more than just a sport for the pot-smoking, school-skipping idlers in their neighborhood – who were part of his daughter’s first introduction to the sport.
“My dad wasn’t really supportive because I was the only girl, and he didn’t want me skating outside with the boys,” she said.
“Back in the day, skateboarding wasn’t really a sport, and it wasn’t like today where you go to the skate park and see a bunch of girls skating – and it’s a real sport in the Olympics. My father used to think it was just something for boys.’
That opinion changed when Bufoni took him to a game and he was able to see the organized, family-friendly sport in real life.
Roughly twenty years later, from that day, the landscape in skating and beyond for women in the sport has changed dramatically. The borders – if they even still exist – are melting away every day.
Sorensen, who had the opportunity to speak with the legendary Billie Jean King at a recent Women’s Sports Foundation gala, brought up another pioneer without being asked.
“It’s not a movement anymore.” she said. ‘It’s not a push, it’s there. women’s sports are taking over. I mean, speaking of Caitlin Clark, right? Just signed a Nike deal ($28 million). I think that’s insane. You know, you’re taking advantage of the personal brand era that we’re in, and you can put yourself in the spotlight as a woman, in any sport.”
Sorensen (left) spoke with Billie Jean King at the Women’s Sports Foundation gala in October
The driver, who competes in the PROSPEC championship (which is one level below the highest PRO competition), wants to be ‘historic’ in her sport. Her second-place finish at a race in New Jersey in August was the best finish by a woman in DRIFT’s 21-year history.
“I could easily jump through the hoops and go to the big leagues, but I want to make sure my last name is written in all those divisions,” she said.
Bufoni is diversifying a bit. Skateboarding is still a priority, she says, but she competes less outside of the X-Games, and the first line of her Instagram bio is perhaps instructive in how she sees her current path.
“Skateboarder -> Racing driver,” it says.
For now, she’s still a real skateboarder. And her continued, sometimes uncomfortable journey through other extreme activities has actually brought her closer to her first love.
“It’s really hard to be good at anything,” she said. ‘You have to dedicate your whole life to be a professional athlete. So every time I tried something different that I wasn’t good at, it made me appreciate skateboarding even more.”