Forza 2: Sick Drifting

Basic Drifting 101


The Bottom Line Let it be known that it takes real modifications and real skill to drift.

Aaaah, drifting. The newest Japanese import that has captivated a small but loyal following in the US. Anyone who's watched Initial D has probably gotten obsessed with the idea of getting ahold of a 1985-87 Corolla. We often watch in awe of the continuous drift on those Subaru commercials and just think "damn, that's cool." It's an almost artful form of vehicle control. You're out of control, but you're controlling being out of control. It's randomness with direction... Chaos put in order. And yet, it's also led to a great deal of stupid people trying to drift their SUVs down residential roads and destroy a whole lot of public property and knock over little old ladies in the process.

The theory
A drift is a continuous lack of traction to keep the car from traveling along the direction it's facing, but at the same time maintaining enough traction so that the drive wheels can keep pushing you towards the inside of the curve. Basically, RWD vehicles are the easiest to drift, but lack some stability. FWD is the hardest to drift, but has high stability -- and without some serious modifications, FWD cars are impossible to drift. 4WD is in between but actually a lot closer to FWD in terms of drifting capability, and has yet higher stability. However, it does take fewer modifications and adjustments (many of which can be purely by computer) to make a 4WD/AWD vehicle driftable.

Bear in mind that automotive skidpad tests are a different story where instead of altering the car, artificial road conditions are created to make the continuous lack of traction possible.

There are several different kinds of drifts based on type of entry and exit and how you control throttle and what sort of angle you maintain and whether it's entry or exit-oriented and so on. All that is beyond the scope of this guide. This is 101.

RWD Drifting
RWD cars naturally and natively oversteer. They oversteer even more when you accelerate after turning a bit. If you don't believe me, try going into a grocery store and pushing a shopping cart through a turn, pushing harder partway through the turn... you'll get the point real fast. Of course, because you have tiny wheels and a high center of gravity, a shopping cart is likely to tip over if you do this too hard, so be careful you don't knock into a few shelves. ;).

So anyway, the idea is that you can enter a turn at a medium speed and then step on the gas a bit and start to oversteer. That sets you up for the opening of a drift. Then what you do is you overdo it on the countersteer. What that does is sets the front tires, which actually do the turning, at a rotation that puts them well beyond the innate slip angle of the tires, which means that they have virtually no grip. The rear tires, on the other hand, are just almost right at the slip angle, so they still have decent grip. Obviously, this is a very fine line of control and feel. And this is something that varies from car to car and mechanical arrangements. The natural slip angle of most any tire is very slight -- something like 7 degrees, and the wider the tire, the wider this angle. Up until that point, any tire is pretty much at maximum grip. So the overall idea is to maintain some grip on the rear tires and lose front tire grip and that allows you to chain a series of drifts. The grip on the rear tires pushes your car inward along the curve and also keeps you oversteering as long as you keep accelerating. The countersteering is there to keep you from from spinning out of control... again, something you need

Why doesn't FWD work?
Now the problem doing this in FWD is the fact that the front tires do the job of both turning AND driving. So you really can't afford to lose traction at the front. The other thing is that FWD cars do not naturally oversteer. They understeer at high speeds. Again, try the shopping cart. Instead of pushing from behind, try pulling the cart from the front. Pay attention to the direction the front wheels are facing in a curve and then try to pull harder in that direction. The cart will probably start skidding outwards and lose ability to hold on to a tight curve.

Typically, to get the the oversteer you want with FWD, that requires hard, short, quick braking. Some drivers and cars can do this with the brake pedal, but usually, this requires the e-brake. And of course, because you can't afford to completely lose traction because this will just send you out in a straight line to the outside of the curve, you need to make sure your entry angle is a little more shallow. It's very hard to chain drifts in FWD, because the rear axle is just giving you passive sliding friction, which slows you down (hence the name "a**-dragging"). Often, it also requires extra suspension tuning so that the rear suspension is harder than the front, and also some lower-traction tires in the rear. So FWD is always at a disadvantage to RWD in a race should you choose to drift because it has such a slow entry speed. Of course, as a general racing rule, what really matters is the line, and if you take the ideal line, you've got the fastest outcome whether you're drifting or gripping.

What about 4WD/AWD?
As I mentioned in FWD, the front tires do the task of both driving and turning the car. In a 4WD, this is still true, except that the front tires are only doing about half the work as far as driving. They still naturally understeer, though, but you have the power to make them oversteer like a RWD. Also if you have something like a Skyline GT-R, you have 4-wheel steering as well, which is a bit more of a pickle... but the GT-R's computer traction control is bit of a different animal which is meant to emulate RWD in most conditions until it senses slip. Now with 4WD, you can still lose traction by using the gas pedal. The conditions are a bit different. You're not trying to cause an oversteer like with RWD. Instead, you're trying to create wheel-spin. As long as you have enough torque (and you might have to downshift on the entry so you can get into the higher RPM range), you can gun the gas pedal enough to make the wheels spin and then you will lose traction, and then by proper throttle control, you maintain just enough grip on the rear wheels and just enough loss of grip on the front wheels that you drift. As simple as I make that sound, this is VERY hard. It takes major skill and an ability to feel how the car is behaving and react quickly. You'll have to make tiny adjustments almost every moment throughout a drift.

In fact, 4WD cars will even be faster than RWD on the exit of a curve, so if you are skilled enough to pull it off, they're the best choice in a race. Usually, the Lancer EVO and Subaru WRX are pictured as these monster drift vehicles because we see them drift so much in the commercials and in rally races. However, it will take some work on the transmission and the engine to get the right torque because no matter what, the EVO and WRX are both 4 bangers, and they get all their power through turbo boost and having the cylinder bores significantly larger than the stroke length. This is good for horsepower, but not so good for torque. Similarly, this is why it's so much easier to drift on dirt or gravel rally tracks than on pristine asphalt.

Now by controlling the grip ratios and torque split, for instance, using 65 series tires in the front and 55 or 50 series in the rear... hardening your shocks in the front and softening your shocks in the rear... reprogramming your computer stability and traction control so that by default, more torque goes to the rear when the computer detects a slip. Edit : I should note that the aforementioned reprogramming is only for making an AWD behave like a RWD while drifting... You can take the opposite approach, which is what the Skyline GT-R and Porsche 911 Turbo do, which lets you enter a drift like a RWD, and exit like an AWD. The former would get you more points in a drift contest, the latter would be better suited to racing. You can make a drift car out of your 4WD vehicle. The cars you see on the rally courses have already had tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours invested in them to make them behave certain ways.

However, by using the understeer that 4WDs naturally give you, what you can naturally do is power slide entering a turn, face the exit line, and gun the gas (ideally, you'd also want to downshift on the exit). This is very powerful exit-oriented racing technique for 4wds, but it doesn't chain well and it is actually a low-high-low-high traction controlling cycle, rather than indefinitely low traction into a slow regain on the final exit, which is what drifting is. In 4WD, you can actually have a significant gain in speed on the exit of a powerslide, whereas in a true drift, no matter the layout, you can't really speed up much at all.

The 4WD drift
Here's the basic idea for a 4WD/AWD drift -- speed up before the curve... downshift then step on the brake hard and cut the curve at that moment. When you line up with the exit direction of the curve, or when you feel the loss of traction, countersteer and push the gas softly. The closer you are to the ideal line, the harder you can press the gas. When you're about 1/3 of a car length before the apex of the curve, press much harder on the gas. If you're just about on the ideal line, you can even floor it at this point, and you should be drifting through the rest of the curve. Otherwise, when you're about 2/3 of the way through the curve, you can nearly floor it at that point (unless it's a very soft/high speed corner, in which case you have to wait a little longer) and then you might drift a little, but at the very least you'll have a good turn with a very fast exit.

Note that the reason I say 1/3 of a car length before the apex of the curve is because the common AWD drifters are the EVO and the WRX STi... both of which are turbocharged, and turbo has a bit of lag. Granted, if you're talking minimum turbo lag, EVOs are probably the best car you can get... but it's still there, and you can feel it. If it was a naturally aspirated, supercharged, or Anti-lag turbo or some precision performance turbocharger, you would likely want to floor the gas right at the apex of the curve.

Disclaimer
Now if you have some RWD or 4WD car and you want to go out to the track and try this out, stop.

As I mentioned, the drift cars out there have gone through many, many modifications to make them viable drift cars. Safety standards generally consider understeer to be a safer thing than oversteer. This makes sense because we often respond to understeer by turning harder and slowing down. Whereas, oversteer often causes the typical driver to panic, or possibly overcountering, which causes us to oversteer in the opposite direction and then we overcounter the other way and so on, and so forth... ultimately lead the car to yo-yo back and forth fishtailing the rear. This means that as much as RWD cars naturally oversteer, in a brand new RWD car off the showroom, the suspension and steering are adjusted so that you understeer.

Now there are plenty of things you can do to make various types of cars suitable for drifting. Unfortunately, due to road safety standards (not just in the US, but anywhere), it is completely illegal to sell a new car with such an arrangement. Certain safety standards are upheld throughout the industry. So you either have to do it yourself or take the car to someone who would do it for you.

DO NOT try to drift on ordinary roads or in a car off the dealer's lot (excluding perhaps a used car that was previously someone else's drift car). When you first practice, make sure you give yourself several feet of margin for error. It takes a while to get the feel and rhythm for the way your car will behave while in a drift.