CATCHING THE DRIFT

Combining ballet's grace and the white-knuckle excitement of street racing, drifting is the Japanese equivalent of NASCAR. Will it take America by storm?

CHANCES ARE YOU HAVEN'T TRIED TO BUY A late-model Nissan or Toyota recently. If you had, you might notice a peculiar thing: the rear-wheel-drive cars are now selling for more than twice what their Kelley Blue Book value was only a few years ago. The reason for the jump in price? Drifting, a motor sport that is perhaps the hottest Japanese import since sushi and is growing exponentially in the United States.

“You could get somebody to give you a [late '80s/early '90s] Nissan 240SX – they weren't worth but $1,800. Now that drifting has kicked in … the cars can go for $5,000,” says Chris Cobetto, national director of U.S. Drift, the sport's sanctioning body, which Cobetto founded in 2001.

Those in the industry liken drifting, which hinges on a combination of speed and agility, to ballet and figure skating. Not exactly the sort of comparisons one would expect with a sport whose bread and butter is guys in their teens and 20s throwing their cars sideways. A bit like rally racing minus the dirt and the actual racing, drifting is the art of sliding a car around curves at full throttle, much as 1950s rear-wheel-drive racers would slide through corners.

While still a relatively unknown sport in America, drifting has found a niche in its native Japan, where it originated 20 years ago. Drifters such as Yasuyuki Kazama and Ken Nomura aren't exactly rock stars in Japan, but their sport is followed, and they are widely lauded for their skills. “If you took a look at NASCAR in 1982, in Japan that's probably how drifting is right now,” says Cobetto.

A giant step ahead of the American drifting scene, Japan has had a professional circuit, the D1 Grand Prix, for more than a decade. While Formula 1, NASCAR and other circuits are based on racing, D1 wins are awarded on intangible style metrics versus the hard-and-fast rule of who crosses the finish line first. D1 puts on a half dozen major Japanese events each year, awards purses of $10,000, and regularly draws crowds of more than 25,000. There is no standard grading system, but a good drift is always scored on the same factors. At professional events, the judges award points; at informal gatherings, it is simply the unofficial level of oohs and ahhs that substitute for official scoring.

First, a higher entry speed produces a better score; the best Japanese drifters top out at 110 mph, and amateurs are usually around 60 mph. Maintaining the speed through the drift is also weighed, just as the duration of the drift is considered, with a longer drift being better. Judges also consider how close the driver is to the “perfect” racing line and how smoothly he transitions from left to right in the series of three to eight S-curves in a typical course. Also, the more severe the car's angle through a turn, the better. Lastly, presentation trumps all, says Ali Sedaghat, assistant director of operations for D1 Productions.

“The end-all, be-all factor is what makes us who we are: it's style. It's like, how much can the driver wow the crowd? How much can that driver really make everybody excited?” Sedaghat offers.

About five years ago, the sport made the hop across the Pacific and found a foothold in California. There it was adopted by guys who had gotten their hands on imported copies of Japanese drifting videos and were looking for a new twist on auto tuning, the automotive hobby where enthusiasts tweak the look and handling of their (mostly Japanese) cars to produce highly customized street machines á la The Fast and the Furious. For many, drifting was a welcome addition. Even though street racing has continued to be big, tuning was devolving into “show-and-shines,” the stagnant open-hood gatherings where owners just buff their cars and display their hardware additions.

“When I started out, I was purely doing ‘grip' driving, and drifting didn't really come into my mind – we were just trying to keep the car on the road, and any time the car started to slide around, that was a bad thing,” says Dave Tong, a 21-year-old student who lives near Los Angeles and organized a team of drifting enthusiasts five years ago. “But I started watching some (Japanese auto-video distributor) Option videos my friend had, and it was such a strange concept, but it seemed like a lot of fun.”

“The feeling of drifting is very strange,” says Tong. “I would have expected it to feel very rough. On the steering wheel, you can feel the tension on the steering linkage in front, but the car actually just slides pretty easily across the ground, and the steering wheel pretty much turns itself.”

The more traditional variant of cornering, socalled “grip driving,” aims to power a car through a turn as fast as possible without it sliding. It relies on adept footwork with the accelorator and brake.

Rather than shooting for maximum speed like other street racing disciplines, most drift amateurs only bump against the posted limit. It is for this reason that Tong believes drifting is safer than so-called “grip” driving, where drivers are trying to keep their cars glued to the road as they make turns well in excess of the speed limit. Most street-racing crashes result from grip drivers losing control of their vehicles – not drifters overextending themselves. That's not to say that Tong and others in the drifting scene haven't had close calls; Tong's own car bears the battle scars of drifts gone awry.

Aside from being new and different, drifting has caught on because it is relatively easy to take up. You can dive into drifting almost immediately, provided you can get your hands on a manual, rear-wheel-drive car. “Unlike Indy and NASCAR ... any spectator that comes to our events and sees those cars can realize that they can start out with a $4,000 car, maybe put another few thousand dollars into it and have a car that will drift … it's within reach,” says Sedaghat, who adds that most drift drivers compete with their everyday vehicles.

Tong bought his Nissan five years ago for a few thousand dollars and dropped another three grand to make the car driftworthy. First on the list of drift alterations is adding a racingstyle bucket seat and a limited slip differential that reduces wheel spin while cornering at high speeds. Appropriate midlevel performance tires round out the package.

Drifting occurs on both sides of the law. On one hand, it's done illegally in parking lots and even around curving mountain passes. On the other side of lawfulness, drifting is increasingly finding a home at open sessions at racetracks around the country. A day at the track costs about $100 and allows drivers to improve as they can concentrate on the driving at hand, versus dodging other cars and the fuzz. Plus, Tong adds, “a lot of the guys you don't really want to be around aren't really going out to the track.”

The idea of drifting in a constructive environment has become popular enough that driving schools have gotten into the game. The Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving in Phoenix, for example, offers a two-day drifting course that costs $3,675.

From a sport that was almost unheard of five years ago, today there are an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 American drifters. And U.S. drifting is making strides toward legitimacy with its older Asian brethren, as Americans begin to compete in the professional Japanese D1 circuit.

Still, there are challenges for the road ahead. First, drifting must sign on sponsors to underwrite events and boost its popularity. The sport must also keep the interest of those who've pushed it this far. But with these factors in place, Cobetto foresees a motor sport that will be the hardtop equivalent of WWE, with its characters, melodrama and crowd-pleasing skills.

Gentlemen, start your engines and get ready to rumble.