Driting 101

After a long consideration period and some requests from my colleagues, I've decided to review a couple of old unpublished articles and compile them into this single small article about drifting.

I'll be using a lot of Keiichi Tsuchiya videos to explain the concepts. If you want to learn, learn with the best, and there is a reason they call him "drift king".

First Things First:

There are 2 types of drifting.. the show-off stuff and the go fast stuff.

I'm not really into the Show-off stuff except for training purposes... so you should try long drifts while learning so you can find the sweet-spot and keep it there easily.

My thing is the Go Fast drift.. this will land us into the good old discussion of grip-driving being better than drift-driving. 

Definition

If you consider drift driving as I do, You'll define it as: the control of the car motion during cornering or in-between cornering, beyond the grip limit, while trying to make the drift pull the motion of the car into the desired trajectory.

If you stop and think about this a bit, what you are saying here is: instead of having the car under grip and use the front wheels to steer it into the corner, you'll have it BEYOND the grip limit (so... going faster) and use the drift to control the inertia of the car movement, trying to turn it into the motion that resolves the curve (this is very important). 

Now I've claimed the "motion that resolves the curve" and that is the key. 

This is the beauty of the well known Mitsubishi/Volvo AYC (Active Yaw Control). If you have the car pointing towards what is the exit of the curve... but still drifting in an arch path thought the curve, you can floor the car most of the time and have a faster way thought than having the grip driving with the tires countering the car's tendency to slide.

In the end, there will always be opinions about grip vs drift but, if there is a grip limit that the speed vs weight (inertia) and tire vs turn radius (drag) will determine and you are OVER it, then, if the car is the same and so are the tires, and the bend on the road, the only chance for you to be over the grip limit is by carrying more speed...so speed is higher... the only remaining argument will be the ability to maintain this speed advantage throughout the entire corner and that is where anyone that has properly driven a proper 4wd or RWD machine will claim that drift driving is faster.

Take a look:

Back to the tech stuff

I divide Drift into 2 main categories : Inertia drift and Grip -Break drift.

They all have influences on each other, as they all are the balance into the lack of grip and the inertia of the movement... but I divide them like this as "ways to initiate the drift".

Grip -Break drift:

Starting with the Grip-breaking drift. There are 3 ways to do this and the  most well known is the Hand-break drift. It's then followed by the Power-Over drift and the least well knows one (unless you've driven a RWD PURE car in the rain on snow), Shift-Down drift. 

They all work by breaking the grip between the tire and the road. The physics are quite fascinating. As the rubber holds the road, there is an elastic deformation that "much like a gecko" makes the tires design deform to meet the road surface. That is why a pure slick has a much more linear response breaking out if grip then a snow tire: there is less elastic deformation to consider. After overwhelming the grip of the tires elastic deformation, the slide will drag the rubber over the pavement and the rubber will create "marbles" as small pieces of rubber break away and roll under the tire... the heat will in turn start to melt the tires, and ultimately it will start to bun the tire and produce that smoke we all know... the smoke is the liberation of gas from the burning tire compound and that reduces the grip further.This is why the loss of grip is progressive... and this is just assuming dry-grip loss... add water, snow or ice in the mix and this VERY SIMPLISTIC explanation gets a hole different level of complexity.

• Back to the methods... you pull the hand break and the car will instantly squat and generate drag! Do that on a straight line and you'll be slowing the car down in the most stupid and inefficient way you can find... if however before you do that, you yank the steering to one side and de-compensate the chassis by shifting the cars center of mass, you'll be inducing a over-steer slide as the rear will follow movement inertia, but will no longer be gripping properly to turn in. 

 

• Power-over... Power drift... cal it whatever you want. The grip loss principle is the same but instead of using the car's stopping power, you use the engine to overwhelm the grip. On some cars all you need to do it floor-it, other will not have power delivery with the sufficient brutality and will require a Clutch-Dump. This is when you clutch the car, rev the engine gaining rotational inertia and reaching a good power band, and then dump the clutch in a brute manner.

The wheels will start to spin and IF YOUR CAR IR AWD with a rear bias... or RWD, you'll induce a drift by over-steer. If you own a FWD... you'll just generate wheel spin and eventually (most likely) under-steer... it's still a slide... but it will be towards the tree on the side of the road and then the repair shop... eventually the hospital or morgue! Under-steer is BAD and except for helping to stabilize a 4wheel drift like the video above, you don't want under-steer near you. 

I often hear people talking about Powerslide, and that it is the same as power drift... well... yes and no! Yes it is the same "thing happening" to the wheels and basic car motion. But there is a fundamental difference as to purpose.

You Drift the car INTO the corner! that means you are using the power of the car and the motion of the car to slide the rear into the position the car will have THROUGH the corner. Power slide is when you allow the rear to slide after the corner has been "resolved". So if you are sliding BEFORE the APEX of the corner, you will be drifting the car, if it is after the APEX, you'll be power sliding the car, as exampled here:

• Finally the shift-down of shift-lock drift. If you own a RWD car... and don't rev-mach your shift-down, you'll eventually find yourself sliding the rear under breaking and shift-down... either while driving through the rain, or on a HEAVY breaking and aggressive shift-down. It's the same effect as a handbrake, but the wheel s aren't really stopped,... they are just spinning too slow for the car's inertial movement and will generate a close to handbrake effect. So, if you own an S2000, for instance, LEARN TO heel-toe and then rev-match you downshifts. If not, then drive really slow in the rain... like an old lady.

In the snow or ice, it can be as simple as just, letting you foot off the throttle. Nasty stuff!

This is also why it is frequently confused with the lift-off over-steer! Lift-off over steer will be explained later because it is a different type of drift induction. However, as explained before, the inertia and grip go hand in hand...they all have a part to play, but we are dividing the categories per Induction of slide method). 

 

Inertia drift (A.K.A. weight-shifting drift):

Yes all drifts will, in the end depend on managing inertia and grip, but this sort of grip doesn't not involve using either brakes, clutch or engine to break grip... This one uses the car's chassis and the way it handles the movement of the center of weight (or mass) your car has, and the inertia the movement brings.

Does it take leverage out of managing the engine or breaks? YES! but then again, not the same way as a break drift does.

• Braking drift is done by steeping heavy on the brakes and wanking the steering into the corner as the front end gets squeezed by the weight shift resulting from the braking. 

In the end, your suspension will be compressing on the front and decompressing on the rear... the weight of the car will be adding grip to the front tires and loosing the rear. As you yank the steering with a firm but progressive movement, you shift the front of the car's weight into the corner, but the rear will try to maintain it's inertia and slide the rear of the car out. 

 

You then need to have enough power form the engine and grip from the tires to pull through. This is not the drift that can be aborted easily, as you are carrying the car weight into the corner and countering it will mean you will have to counter the inertia you where provoking to happen in the first place. A full spin is sometimes the best way to recover... but not always.

 

The best cars for this are heavy and soft damped cars. I often use this technique on road cars due to the soft suspension setups, and you can even slide SUVs like this... I used to drift the Volvo XC90 this way... really easy to work the Volvo DSTC with this technique. In this care I just delay the breaking and then last minute, I step a but harder and yank the steering. 

 

This method needs a properly setup front end. If your car is too toe-out or the geometry is bad (wear bushings, damaged wishbones, etc) you can fail to induce the car s front into the corner with enough force to destabilize the rear and may end up under-steering. Careful!

 

This is an example of a Breaking drift. 

 

• The Scandinavian-flick or feint-drift is done by proposely destabilizing the car and making it slide. It is the common cause of accidents on the road while diverting from a collision. In essence, If you want to steer right, as you approach the corner, you first steer left (compressing the right side suspension) and then flick the steering right (compressing the left side suspension while the right side springs back violently). This immediately induces the car into a spin and it does so in a very DECISIVE and NOT EASY TO COUNTER way. You better know what you're doing if you plan to do this at speed.

Take a look at it here:

 

• Financially the lift off over-steer. Lift-off is really easy on a FWD car... and again, a common cause of accidents on the road as people get pulled into corners, they get scared, they lift-off, the car's engine starts decelerating the front, moving the mass and loosing the rear... as the rear looses grip, people get stared and break, making it worse and crashing. This is the reason some cars are "engineered" (if you can cal it that) to UNDER-STEER on limit, as the lift-off scared driver will gently pull it back into a possible apex line.

Take a look at an example here:

On a RWD it is a bit trickier as it requires a provoking of the car with acceleration and liftoff so that, much like the Scandinavian-flick (or feint) drift, the car compresses and decompresses the suspension. It is the same as a Scandinavian-flick, but instead of Side to Side, you compress rear and the front... So you accelerate hard, compressing the rear springs, then lift-off decompressing them and compressing the front and the weight shifts... you may need to do this in sequence at the rhythm of the car's suspension to gain enough inertia to make the chassis destabilization work properly.

This is an advanced for due to the difficulty of matching the cars suspension dynamics, the speed and the simple fact that if you get it wrong... you're gonna crash HARD... it's also the most efficient way to prove that drifting can be faster than grip driving.

 You can see itin detail in the Drift Bible video that I recommend at the end of the article.

 

There is A LOT MORE into drifting and learning how to do so. 

My recommendation is you buy DriftKing,s Drift Bible and take it easy and off public roads. 

This article has been rushed into editing (due to my lack of time) due to a special request form my colleagues at SwivelSecure team. If you like it, thank them:

• Christian Lisboa
• David Assuncao
• Diogo Figueiredo
• Joao Leal
• Marco Rodrigues
  
• Ricardo Wong
• Tiago Silva

 

 Have fun and stay safe.