Drifting is a driving technique where the driver oversteers on purpose, which causes a loss of traction in the rear wheels, while he maintains vehicle control and a relatively high rate of speed. Drifting is considered to be occurring when the rear slip angle is greater than the front slip angle prior to the corner apex, and the front wheels are pointing
in the opposite direction to the turn (e.g. the car is turning to the right and the wheels are pointing to the left or vice-versa). I’ve got an AWESOME video here with legendary drift king Keiichi Tsuchiya (he was the stunt coordinator and primary stunt driver in The Fast and the Furious – Tokyo Drift ) that covers how to set up |
your car to drift, plus 6 different drifting techniques that he uses where you can see exactly what his feet are doing and he talks you through everything, but…the video is 40 minutes long…erm…I know, that’s long, and I would usually prefer to use something much shorter, BUT it gets straight into the HOW of drifting within the first minute or so plus I like the fact that it’s so comprehensive and the fact that it’s done by such a well-known expert and current legend in the drifting community:
Additional Resources
If you want to take this further and really get into drifting two things I’d recommend you check out are the Ultimate Drifting DVD where they go to Tokyo and you even get to see the pros doing a few illegal street races, VERY cool, also definitely take a look at Paul Morton’s book, How to Drift: The Art of Oversteer (S-A Design).
Also, an excellent free site with lots of good info is DriftLock.co.uk.
And, if you want to see someone learning how to drift a M3 in a nice short little 6 minute video, have a look at this: How to drift a BMW M3