WHAT THE HELL IS DRIFTING!?
Drifting! Yay! Wahoooo! Skids! Slides! Backies! Twinning! Getting doors! Hooning!
So many different words for getting excited about losing control of the rear end of your car. Seems like a load of jargon thrown around a scene that’s become pretty niche, really. So what even is drifting? Where did it start? Where is it going? What does all this even mean?!
Let’s start in the logical place; the beginning.
Vaughn Gitten Jr in the lead RTR Mustang, Dean “Karnage” Kearney in the chase Dodge Viper at Formula Drift Long Beach, courtesy of gazettes.com
What the hell is this drifting thing anyway?
Drifting is, in very simple terms, controlling the slide of a rear wheel drive car. That’s it. In it’s most basic form it’s nothing more or less than that. Most people who have really got involved in the scene would say that there is a requirement for another layer of technical difficulty layered on top in order to differentiate drifting from power sliding (think Jeremy Clarkson at the test track being followed by billowing clouds of tyre smoke as he smugly shouts “Powaaaaaaaaaah” into the camera) but, really, that’s just a simple form of drifting overall.
Modern drifting, at least in it’s competition format, predominantly focuses on judged runs through a defined course. In most cases these are done solo for qualifying, with the judges looking for the driver to maintain the drift from the start of the course to the finish whilst accurately positioning the car in certain places on the track (known as clipping points). The judges give points out of 100 for qualifying runs based on their set criteria and then, using the table of drivers created by those points, put the drivers into battles. This is usually a top 32 format where the number 1 qualifier will battle the number 32 driver, the number 2 driver will battle the number 31 driver, and so on, with the 32 being whittled down to 16, then 8, then 4, and finally the last 2 will face off at the end. The “battle tree” is laid out so as to make the higher qualifying drivers route to the final easiest to begin with, then getting progressively harder, with the top 2 qualifiers only meeting if they both make it to the final.
This only makes sense if you understand what we mean by “battle”. The idea is that a battle pits 2 drivers into an evenly matched face-off through the same course used for qualifying. Both drivers will run twice; once as the lead driver (whose goal is to do the best qualifying run they can), and once as the chase driver (whose goal is to mirror as closely and accurately the line of the lead driver whilst keeping the tightest possible proximity to the lead car). If the judges can’t decide a winner after those 2 runs then they’ll do the battle again until there’s a winner; known as a “One More Time”, or “OMT” for short.
Kunimitsu Takahashi racing his KPGC10 Skyline. Original photo from Car Throttle
Hmm, that sort of makes sense, but how did anyone even come up with this?
Drifting as we would recognise it in the modern era owes its’s development to All Japan Touring Car racer Kunimitsu Takahashi, although he was known to credit his use of the driving style to the British rally drivers of the preceding era. The tyres that were used at the time were particularly fast on rear wheel drive cars when driven with higher slip angles (ie, not just with the rear wheels following the line of the front tyres, but rather sliding around on a wider line), very unlike the current era of racing slicks. As a result of this Takahashi’s development of a very throttle heavy driving style with greater angles earned him both a huge fan base and several championships.
In the late 1970s and through the 1980s a young Keiichi Tsuchiya developed his own driving style for the All Japan Touring Car Championship based on that of his idol; Kunimitsu Takahashi. Piloting the (now legendary) AE86, Keiichi Tsuchiya honed his skills not just on the racetrack, but also in the mountain roads of Japan during street races. These mountain roads, known as Touge (pronounced toe-ghey), were a hot-bed of night time racing and Tsuchiya’s flamboyant style quickly earned him the nickname “The Drift King”.
Keiichi Tsuchiya with his famous AE86 on the cover of, now sadly out of business, Best MOTORing
Most people involved in the modified car scene and race scenes know Tsuchiya from this monicker. He is credited with being the father of modern drifting. Through his partnership with Option Magazine, specifically their chief editor of the time Daijiro Inada, he would shape the sport by presenting it to the world. Tsuchiya and Inada founded D1 Grand Prix in 1988, made the first overseas demonstration of drifting in 1996 at Willow Springs, and oversaw the spread of the series throughout the world. D1, and it’s various off-shoots, would spawn hundreds of other series as competition, all of which would try to push the original in different and exciting ways. From starting with just judged solo runs across a defined course, the sport would develop to feature battles (outlined above), known as Tsuiso.
Ikaten - the precurser to D1GP continued on for a number of years pushing team drifting and various other, less “battle” focused driving. Image courtesy of Japanese Nostalgic Car
Okay, but I’ve seen modern drifting and it doesn’t sound much like you’ve just described!
You’re not wrong! As time passed the cars involved in these competitions stopped being set up for low angle, high speed runs that just happened to feature oversteer. With the racing taking a back-seat to the spectacle of the slide the cars moved towards modifications that helped them maintain bigger angles for longer and chase other cars more easily. As these techniques split further away from the Japanese origins, drifting started to fall into some different camps: the original speed and proximity orientated camp of “traditional” drifting in Japan remained prevalent there, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and a few others; then the other major camp became more “Western” drifting. This focused heavily on much higher angle through larger parts of the course, even at the expense of the speed, as this was believed to be more of a spectacle.
Michael Essa’s E46 Formula Drift car, running a “Western” style Wisefab lock kit. Image by David Moore Photography via Wisefab Switzerland
We aren’t going to say which is better. We have an opinion on the style we prefer doing, as well as promoting when teaching people, but we won’t say one is necessarily superior than the other. We will talk about some of the major setup differences between the different camps in other blog posts but, for now, the easiest way to think of it is that for many, many years the Japanese style was seen as being much more focussed on the skill of the driver and maintained a much lower overall car spec. In contrast; Western style still requires a lot of skill, but a significantly higher proportion of the build became about engineering parts to make the high angle easier and easier to maintain. With how things have changed it’s often thought that the Japanese style lends itself to more “grassroots” type competitions in the West, and then as one progresses through the ranks the car would become increasingly geared towards the higher angle style. This isn’t a bad way of approaching things, as long as drivers don’t progress too quickly on to higher spec cars and end up being carried by a more capable machine than they need!
Naoki Nakamura at Meihan Circuit, the absolute epitome of “Eastern” style drifting. Picture by Casey Dhnaram from shirtstuckedin
So what’s the situation with all that right now?
Well, the aggressive separation between the two camps is definitely closing. As drifting is a judged motorsport it’s always been down to the judges of the various competitions to shape how the sport develops in their country or area. It seems that the weighting is coming back towards higher speeds and closer proximity in the west, where as in Japan they’re starting to embrace the extra technology to elevate their spectacle even further with more weighting going onto sustained angle mid-corner. The FIA have now become involved with a yearly competition which will doubtless shape how things are perceived at the very highest level, but that’s going to take some years to filter through. In the meantime the overall balance seems to be that now judges want EVERYTHING! Speed, angle, proximity, smoke, spectacle, and style all getting weighting in the judging criteria to push the sport forward. The higher tiers in the national levels have all become focused on giving the fans something to really get behind and have moved to live-streaming of events online (or, in the unique case of D1NZ, on national television live!), as well as maintaining larger audience numbers. The lower tiers are trying to focus on giving drivers chances to prove themselves and practice days have sprung up everywhere!
Tsujigiri team-member Ben Somerville in his JZX81 chasing MNM Engineering owner Mike Marshall in his 2JZ powered E92 M3 at Extreme Torque Sunderland, 2015. Courtesy of Smokin’ Images
This all sounds pretty good fun, I guess. Should I get involved?
Absolutely! It’s enormously fun! It’s also fantastic for making one a safer driver, as Toyota recently published! Plus you’ll learn all those strange phrases we mentioned at the start that we haven’t talked about anywhere in this post (don’t worry, they’re all just colloquial slang for different parts of drifting, the important thing is to just get involved! Almost regardless of where you are in the world you will be able to find a local practice day for drifting within a couple of hours drive of you! There are schools for drifting in most countries and, between them and our blogs, you can find everything to take you from a complete novice to a seasoned pro in no time at all. If that doesn’t suit you then you should definitely check out our Guide to Digital Drifting blog post and see how to get involved online and develop all the skills you need for just a fraction of the cost of going drifting in the real world!
-Tsujigiri Collective