What is Car Drifting all about?

History of Car Drifting

The history of drifting as we know it today goes way back to the 1960’s to the winding mountain roads of Japan. Back then a group of racers called the Rolling Zoku raced on the twisty mountain roads of Japan trying to set record times between point A and B.

As the racers improved and their lap times became faster, these racers started going over the grip limit of their tires. They found out that by going over the limit the car was still controllable. In the end it didn’t seem to be faster, but it sure was a outrageous and exciting way to show off car control skills. It was then that racers in Japan first studied this driving technique.

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Later on in the 1970’s there was the All Japan Touring Car Championship. The racers were heavily competing against each other, and each lap the racers increased their lap times bit by bit, testing the tires’ grip to the limit! This resulted in an awesome spectacle of car control where the racing drivers drifted their cars incredibly fast through the corners.

One of those drivers was a former motorcycle driver, Named 'Kunimitsu Takahashi'. Takahashi’s drifting technique was unmatched by anyone else. He was able to hit the corner’s apex at high speeds perfectly and caused the car to oversteer. With with great control he mastered the drifts and reached great exit speeds…

Combined with the fact that he was driving a car that was build for the win, the Nissan Skyline KPGC10, or “Hakosuka”, he accounted for more than 50+ straight victories on a row and captured several championship titles along the way. The spectacle of burning rubber made the crowd love Takahashi, under whom was a boy named Keiichi Tsuchiya.

The All Japan Touring Car Championship later evolved into the racing organization called JGTC (Japan Grand Touring Championship), or Super GT, where today Takahashi is the chairman of.
Keiichi Tsuchiya was an ordinary street racer and was a big fan of Takahashi’s drifting technique. Inspired by Takahashi’s driving skills Tsuchiya joined the Fuji Freshman Race in 1977. This is how his professional career started, but he was still a street racer. For day and night he practiced the drift techniques on the Japanese tight and twisty mountain roads (called touge, pronounced "toh-ge"). Many attribute the return of drifting as a competitive sport. Here eventually evolved into a heavily funded and advertised competitive events, sanctioned by organizations and held on private tracks.Throughout the whole history of drifting it has been an infamous place known for its illegal drifting. Well aware of possible oncoming traffic, cars go head to head on a downhill or uphill battle, or just to have fun driving the mountain roads.

With his 1986 Toyota Sprinter Trueno GTV. Takahashi's aggressive drifting skills — he was famous for hitting the apex (the point where the car is closest to the inside of a turn) at high speed and then drifting through the corner, preserving a high rate of speed — earned him several championships and a legion of fans who enjoyed the spectacle of burning tires and perilous speed.
Drifting "officially" began in the United States in 1996 with an event at Willow Springs racetrack in California hosted by the magazine Option, but it did not become popular until around 2002, and has since exploded into a massively popular form of motorsport. Japanese drifters are still considered to be at the cutting edge of technique and car development, but their American counterparts are quickly catching up. Many American enthusiasts consider drifting to be an extension of American motorsports such as dirt track racing, however "drifting" in its modern form as a sport unto itself is of Japanese origin.

Many of the techniques used today in drifting were developed by rally drivers competing on dirt, gravel and snow. On such surfaces, the fastest way to take a corner is generally by sliding.

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Today

Nowadays, drifting has evolved into a competitive sport where drivers compete in rear-wheel drive cars to keep their cars sideways as long as possible. At the top levels of competition, especially the D1 Grand Prix from Japan and others in Australia, the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, drivers are able to keep their cars sliding for extended periods of time, often through several turns.

Drifting competitions are judged based not on the time it takes to complete a course, but on line, angle, speed, and show factor. Line involves taking the correct line, which is usually announced by judges. Angle is the angle of a car in a drift, the more the better. Speed is the speed entering a turn, the speed through a turn, and the speed exiting the turn; faster is better. The show factor is based on multiple things, such as the amount of smoke, how close the car is from the wall, and falling aero. It is based on how "cool" everything looks.

Final rounds of competition often include tandem drift runs nicknamed tsuiso (chase-run) in Japanese, where one car follows another through the course, attempting to keep up with or even pass the car in front. In the tsuiso rounds, it does not matter if the racing line is wrong; it matters who has the most exciting drift.

Normally, the leading car usually produces a max-angle, but still close off the inside a little to prevent passing. The chasing car usually drifts with less angle, but very close to the lead car. But a car does not even have to keep up, and in fact in some cases a car that was left behind on the straight produces a beautiful drift, winning him that round. A spin, understeer, or collision results in a disqualification of the offending party.

To make judging less ambiguous, the DriftBox has been introduced, which uses GPS to measure the angle, speed and g-force during a run. This takes out the guessing element when it comes to judging the angle and speed of the drift.