"I wanted to build a drift car, I always had street cars and I wanted to drive instead of just park the car and look at it," he said during this year's Holley LS Fest East event at Beech Bend Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The car is a 1993 Nissan 240SX (known colloquially by chassis code S13), but it is powered by the versatile and popular LS engine platform.

Anderton-Holt, who hails from Shelbyville, Tennessee, came of age at a time when drifting began to reach the masses in North America, making its way across the Pacific Ocean from its Japanese origins. Anderton-Holt and his friends watched drifting videos online, played drifting video games and eventually began driving simulators before building cars to drift in real life.

Anderton-Holt is also carrying on a family tradition. His dad owned Chevelles and Novas, but the son is involved in the performance hobby in his own way. 

"He passed that heritage on to me, but the generation gap shows in the cars," Anderton-Holt said. "I like the old-style muscle cars, but I'm kind of drawn to the early '90s Japanese cars. I was born in 1990 so I grew up looking at that kind of stuff. It only made sense to me to just put an American motor inside a Japanese car."

Swapping the popular GM LS power plant into a wide variety of foreign cars is popular in the drift scene, with LS engines known for their ease of use, light weight and reliability.

Anderton-Holt bought the S13 as a rough, bare-bones shell half a decade ago and has been driving for a little over three years now. He completely tore down and stripped everything on the car before adding a body kit, bumpers, fenders, overfenders a Wisefab angle kit, roll cage and more. Originally, the engine in the car was a four-cylinder which Anderton-Holt used as he learned how to drive.

He had plans to eventually swap to an LS, and bought a stock 5.3L LS engine from an online marketplace which sat for a while on a stand in his garage. However, after major mechanical issues with the four-cylinder power plant, he needed to install the LS quickly to be able to get on track again. Today it features a Summit Stage 4 cam, along with an upgraded intake and headers, and a Holley Terminator X engine control unit. The bottom end remains stock.

"The availability of parts and the reliability is probably what drove me to do that," he said of his reasoning for swapping to LS power. "They're just really easy to work on, too. If something goes wrong here at the track we can usually have it back up and running in a matter of a few minutes."

After taking part in some local shows around Middle Tennessee, LS Fest was Anderton-Holt's first major drift event.

"I'm just kind of dipping my toes into competition," he said. "We haven't really dabbled in it before, but I feel like I'm getting to where I can handle that. I'm trying to take the next steps."

A real estate agent by trade, Anderton-Holt doesn't necessarily have the desire to move up the ranks or compete professionally in the drifting world. Rather, he is looking at it as a fun hobby that fulfills his competitive desire.

"I'm kind of entry-level, and then I show up to events like this and there are guys here in pro cars," he said. "There's a huge opportunity there to be able to drive with some of the best guys in the biz. So that's kind of the reason why I wanted to come."

Anderton-Holt turned plenty of heads during the weekend, qualifying 17th and ultimately competing in the top 16 in the Drift Challenge.