Drifting Techniques

The idea of drifting doesn't seem to be difficult to grasp. It is pretty much just being able to get your car to drift sideways. There are many drifting techniques and styles that are used to get your car into a sideways position. Of course, the longer you are in a sideways position, the better, but it is really not as easy to execute as it may sound. There is alot more to drifting than meets the eye. When you manage to drift sideways, you are probably used to counter steering in order to straighten your car out. But ideally, you want to exaggerate your counter steer and actually over steer. These techniques will cause the car to turn into another drift. And, that is actually what the object of the sport is. You want to stay in a sideways drift for as much as the run as possible. This is why a lot of drifters choose the venue of mountains or Tohge, for the constant curves that are available. This allows for a continual drift one right after another. Any decent drifter should be able to go into four or five consecutive drifts without ever gaining traction throughout the slide. Basically, there are a couple popular techniques to get your car to drift. One of the techniques invloves popping the clutch. Once you set your car into position with an on-coming turn, you want to disengage the clutch and down shift into 2nd gear. While this is happening, you want to peg your RPM's at about 4000 - 5000 (The number of RPM's depends on what type of vehicle you're in, but that's about where you want to be), and you want to start stearing away from the turn. Now, simultaneously engage or pop your clutch and stear hard away from the turn. This should get your back wheels spinning pretty good. The trick is to maintain your back wheels from gaining traction and at the same time staying in control by stearing the front wheels and playing with the accelerator and clutch. You might have to pop the clutch a couple times before the next turn.
The second technique to get you drifting is actually using the e-brake. Not as popular for the rear-wheel drive drifters, but a must for front-wheel drive cars. You want to set yourself in a good position for the upcoming turn, once you start turning, you pull the e-brake up causing loss of traction on the rear wheels. The feeling is a bit different than the RWD's and you slow down alot quicker, but it's about the only way for a FWD drifter. It is very difficult to maintain a smooth drift especially when there are multiple turns one right after another.