On a dusty desert racetrack two hours northeast of Los Angeles, Leticia Bufoni found herself in an uncomfortable situation.
The Brazilian skateboarder – who once performed a trick while jumping out of an airplane – is no stranger to an adrenaline rush, and has taken up racing herself in the last few years. But this was different.
‘I wasn’t born to be a passenger seat person,’ she exclusively told Mail Sport, after being whipped around by drifter Amanda Sorensen.
‘I’ve been like that my whole life. I really like to be in control of things. And I don’t know why, but every time I get in a race car in a passenger seat, I get really sick.’
Bufoni’s propensity to being in charge goes beyond Sorensen’s aggressive driving.
The six-time X-Games champion arrived in the USA 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 as drift driver Amanda Sorensen took the wheel
Bufoni has close to 4million Instagram followers and has lived a remarkable life in sports
The pair were at Apple Valley Speedway in California, about two hours from Los Angeles
In other words: she had no choice but to take the reins of her own life.
‘I was by myself,’ she began. ‘I was paying my own bills, I was doing my own laundry, cooking 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 started really being in control of everything.’
Bufoni’s new Team Ignition show, then, has been an exercise in relinquishing that sort of control.
In the web series – which includes this excursion with Sorensen – Bufoni has sampled a bevy of extreme activities and routinely stepped outside of her sport with experts in other disciplines.
She’s gone shark diving (which she called ‘terrifying’), basejumping and bouldering (climbing without ropes or harnesses), but this day saw her link up with Sorensen, a 21-year-old Formula DRIFT driver determined to climb the ranks of her sport.
The Las Vegas-bred Sorensen comes from a much different sporting (and life) background than Bufoni.
While the Brazilian has only recently dived headfirst into racing, Sorensen is a lifer on the track and comes from a family of drivers.
Go-karting began at six before her family switched to drifting at the age of 14. Her brother Brandon is a pro driver as well.
Bufoni, seen in 2023, is a six-time X Games champion and competes in the street discipline
Sorensen is one of several extreme sports athletes that Bufoni has teamed up with for the series
She called Bufoni a ‘sister’ to her and the pair share a similar propensity to push the envelope
Bufoni has also taken an interest in driving in recent years and recently signed with Porsche
Still, Sao Paulo-born Bufoni and Sorensen – who calls the elder athlete a ‘sister’ to her – share a like-mindedness and a similar aptitude for risk-taking.
‘If I’m not pushing myself and challenging myself, I feel like I have no purpose,’ Sorensen said.
She later added: ‘We’re both thrill seekers. We’re both pushing each other. We’re very particular, we can see each other’s weaknesses, and we’re always like, “you know, you could probably do this better”.’
Bufoni, who has also donned a wingsuit at 12,000 feet in the air for her new show, has a similar sort of curiosity.
‘Even though I like to be a leader, I also love learning new stuff, and I’ve been meeting amazing athletes that I’ve been learning a lot [from],’ she said. ‘And it’s so cool to meet people from different sports that I never met before.’
It’s not surprising that two athletes in extreme sports have a thing for adrenaline kicks. But there’s a deeper sort of stubbornness that they share as well, one which goes beyond a spike of the heart rate.
Sorensen, who boasts 1.7million Instagram followers and says she negotiates all of her own sponsorship deals (including one with the US Air Force), is working to gradually scrape away at the perception that female drivers often have in her male-dominated field.
‘I think a lot of drivers can come in and just hang out with their boys, get along with the bros,’ she began. ‘Whereas as a female, you have to slowly over time gain that respect as an individual in the sport – you have to be on the box, you have to podium. You have to show that you can go out there and drive as dirty and as hard as they can.’
Sorensen is hoping to be a trailblazer in her sport, and made the podium this summer
Sorensen, seen second from left at the final at the Extreme E Hydro X Prix, said she has to show her male competitors that she ‘can go out there and drive as dirty and as hard as they can.’
Bufoni has undertaken a slew of extreme activities for her Team Ignition show, including shark diving
Bufoni, meanwhile, signed a racing contract with Porsche this year, and has shown her commitment to motorsports by moving outside of LA to be closer to this racetrack.
But her grit is perhaps best evidenced by the story of her journey into skating.
Years before she topped other competitors at the X-Games, her biggest skating opponent was actually her very own father – who was initially a massive skeptic of the sport and cut her board in half when she was just 11 years old. She began setting up another board the very next day, refusing his demands to quit.
It took major convincing to show him that skating was more than just a sport for the weed-smoking, school-skipping ne’er-do-wells in their neighborhood – who were part of his daughter’s initial introduction into the sport.
‘My dad wasn’t really supporting me, because I was the only girl, and he didn’t want me to be outside skating with the boys,’ she said.
‘Back in the day, skateboarding wasn’t really a sport, and it wasn’t like nowadays that you go to the skate park and you see a bunch of girls skating – and it’s real sport in the Olympics. Back in the day, my dad just thought it was something for boys.’
That opinion changed once Bufoni brought him to a competition and he was able to see organized, family-friendly sport in the flesh.
Roughly two decades later from that day, the landscape in skating and beyond for women in sports has shifted dramatically. The limits – if they’re even still there – are melting away each day.
Sorensen, who had the chance to speak with the legendary Billie Jean King at a recent Women’s Sports Foundation gala, brought up another trailblazer unprompted.
‘It’s not a movement anymore.’ she said. ‘It’s not a push, it’s present. women’s sports is taking over. I mean, talk about Caitlin Clark, right? Just signed a [$28 million] Nike deal. That’s insane to me. You know, you leverage the personal brand era that we’re in, and you can highlight yourself as a female in whatever sport it is.’
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 top tier PRO league), wants to be ‘historic’ in her sport. Her second-placed finish at a New Jersey race in August was the best finish by a woman in DRIFT’s 21-year history.
‘I could easily just jump my way through the hoops and go to the big leagues, but I want to make sure my last name is written in every single one of those divisions,’ she said.
Bufoni is diversifying a bit. Skateboarding is still a priority, she says, but she’s competing less outside of the X-Games, and the first line of her Instagram bio is perhaps instructive of how she views her current path.
‘Skateboarder -> Race Car Driver,’ it reads.
For now, she’s still very much a skateboarder. And her ongoing, at times uneasy tour of other extreme activities has actually brought her closer to her first love.
‘It’s really hard to be good at something,’ she said. ‘You got to dedicate your whole life to be a professional athlete. So every time I try something else that I was not good at, I just appreciated skateboarding even more.’
