(contemplative orchestral music)
- [Narrator] Drifting, the most exhilarating
and mesmerizing exhibition of style
and control while driving a car.
Drifting is graceful, simple even, in appearance.
(tires squealing) (engine roaring)
But inside the car, there is a riot of activity
as the driver wrestles with steering angle, braking,
and wheel speed to throw the car
in an unnatural position, sideways.
For those of us that haven't had a chance to push a car
to its limit, drifting is hard to comprehend,
so we reached out to an expert for help.
- Why do people drift?
You want to just demonstrate the supreme car control
in showing that you can drive better
and more spectacularly than the guy next to you.
Think of drifting like an art.
Drifting is like dancing.
People judge you by how nice you did the dance
and how good the angles of your drifting skills are.
- [Narrator] That's Leona Chin.
She's a decorated motorsports veteran of over 10 years
with experience in rally, circuit racing, endurance racing,
gymkhana, autocross, drag, off-road, and go-kart.
She's the driver behind mega-viral prank videos
and the Most Inspiring Female Motorsports Athlete
as voted by the Motorsports Association of Malaysia.
(engine roaring) (tires squealing)
To those who know of her motoring exploits,
she goes by another name, the Queen of Drift.
Leona helped us understand how drifting works
from a science perspective.
- [Leona] According to Newton's first law,
it's the law of inertia that states
that when an object is moving,
it wants to keep moving the same way,
and it resists any changes to that motion
unless there is an external force causing a change.
Thus, in this case,
the car's natural tendency is to go straight.
When the car's steering wheel is turned,
then there is an external force.
- [Narrator] That force is the friction
between the tires and the track, also called traction.
When you turn the wheels, some of that traction
is angled perpendicular to the car's velocity.
So instead of moving in a straight line,
the car begins to follow a curved path.
But this is not drifting.
This is what happens during a normal turn.
So when does a turn turn into a drift?
When you overcome the friction
between your tires and the road.
And you do that by entering a curve
at an unusually sharp angle or an abnormally high speed.
Think of a car moving on a surface
where the force of friction is very low, like on ice.
A driver may turn their tires in order to avoid
an obstacle like a stopped car,
but the traction between the ice and the tires is so low
that it's easy to overcome it.
The car is in a slide.
The same thing happens when a driver takes a curve
too sharp or too fast on an asphalt racetrack.
Now, a regular driver probably wouldn't
know what to do during a slide
and would likely lose control and go off the road.
But professionals like Leona Chin can turn that slide
into a drift by taking back control of the car.
How?
By turning the driving wheel
in the opposite direction of the bend.
Turning the wheel changes the direction
of the friction force from the skid.
That can change the direction of the skid itself.
(tires squealing) (engine roaring)
And if you know exactly how fast to hit the curve
and exactly how to turn the steering wheel,
you'll make drifting look easy,
even though it's anything but.
- So simply put, you need to balance
the amount of traction you lose
on the rear wheels and balance the wheel speed
and slide constantly through a drift.