Why is drifting so cool?
Look, I’m not a gear head, I don’t even play that many racing games,
but, this, to me, is what peak performance looks like.
[an acceleration of syncopated techno music]
- You turn. You slide. YA FLOOR IT.
Even if you’ve never played a “realistic” racing sim, you’ve probably earned some
boost by drifting in Mario Kart.
Maybe you’ve burned space rubber in Star Wars: Squadrons
or drifted a freakin’ jet in the criminally underrated Tom Clancy’s HAWX.
Hell, I’ve drifted on a horse in Red Dead Redemption and a dog in Monster Hunter Rise.
Drifting is practically a standard feature in games these days,
so then why isn’t NASCAR full of sideways NASCARS?
Well, despite how absolutely sick that would be, they don’t do it because drifting in
real life isn’t efficient.
In fact, it actually slows you down.
The big sticky tires and giant spoilers that professional racers use basically glue the
cars to the asphalt, so they can just cruise through corners.
[roaring car sounds]
If you’re from ‘round these parts,
it’s likely your first introduction to drifting was in the 2006 film The Fast and the Furious:
Tokyo Drift.
As ludicrously over-the-top as that movie was, it did get one thing right:
Drifting, like a lot of cool things, came from Japan.
Specifically, the country’s winding mountain passes, known as Tōge.
Back in the 1960s, daring racers would drive at high speeds through the squiggly S-bends
that, ironically, were designed to limit the speed of drivers.
Unlike the wide turns of a racetrack, it was faster to slide through these tight corners
and lose a little momentum, than it was to slow down like a square-ass salaryman.
They were also driving normal cars that didn’t have pro traction control to keep them nailed
to the road, so they learned to control the drift.
[buzzing car motor]
Usually the goal of these illicit mountain races was simply to get the fastest time on
a certain stretch of road, but sometimes, drivers would face off in dangerous drifting duels.
This is where drift culture got its start: underground… on a mountaintop.
Drifting was cool, because drifting was for the baaaaad boys.
One of those bad boys was Kunimitsu Takahashi,
who pioneered drifting in competitive races, earning himself the title
“The Father of Drifting.”
He got his start in motorcycle driving, but after injuring himself in a race, he decided
to take a break…
by driving sideways…
in a race car…
on purpose.
Takahashi’s audacious style of driving won him the All-Japan Touring Car Championship
multiple times.
It also inspired a generation of competitive drifting enthusiasts, including a young man
named Keiichi Tsuchiya, perhaps better known by his nickname the “Drift King”.
Tsuchiya got his start in illegal street racing, then got wildly popular and decided to go
pro in 1977.
But he was always a street racer at heart. In 1987 he made an infamous 23 minute video
called “Pluspy” where he carved up the Usui mountain pass in his Toyota AE86 Corolla.
The video got his racing license temporarily suspended, but that only made him cooler.
It’s hard to overstate how important Tsuchiya is to the culture of drifting.
In fact, his life story inspired the manga and anime Initial D, which in turn
(WET, DISGUSTING wink, wINk WINKwINK),
inspired The Fast and Furious 3: Tokyo Drift. Fun fact, Tsuchiya was actually a stunt coordinator and stunt driver
in Tokyo Drift. He even got a cameo in the movie!
As a fisherman.
It’s partly through Tsuchiya’s efforts that modern drifting has matured from an underground
hobby into a global competition.
Drifting tournaments aren’t about speed; instead drivers are evaluated on exactly how
sick their drifts are.
Some even include thrilling tandem face-offs, in a nod to the original head-to-head Tōge races.
Even if it’s gone a li'l mainstream, drifting is still very cool because it’s still very
hard to pull off.
Drivers need to lose traction in their rear tires, something drivers are usually trying
to avoid. And then, once they’re sliding in the right direction, they need to turn
their front wheels in the wrong direction, and then maintain this very unstable slide
for as long as possible.
It’s essentially a controlled loss of control.
Twinkie (Tokyo Drift): When you drift, if you ain't outta control, you ain't in control.
- Obviously, there’s wayyyy more to it than that, but if you want to how
to actually pull off a drift, I suggest you check out out “The Drift Bible." It's another video by
the “Drift King” where he shows you how to pull off a drift.
All this drift talk really makes me want my own cool drift name,
why don't you give me some ideas in the comments below.
The other roguish part of drifting is that you've gotta make some adjustments
to your car.
And by adjustments I mean, kinda fuck it up? Lemme give you an example: one of the most common
modifications drift-heads do is weld the rear differential together.
This does make it easier to drift, but because the rear tires can’t spin independently anymore,
it makes it worse at being... a car.
[the troubling, scudding sound of a car with its rear differential welded)
And don’t even get me started on the kind of modifications competitive drifters
make to their cars!
It takes a lot of work to make a car go sideways like it's in a video game,
and it turns out that most of that work is done before the car even
gets to the track. Boring!
That’s the reality of drifting that video games thankfully DON'T try to recreate.
They strip out all the dull and complicated parts, and throw in some turbo boost because
hell yeah.
The end result isn’t something that just looks good; it feels good, too.
But while most video game drifting takes place in pro racers, or arcade racers, or non-racers,
there is a genre I haven’t mentioned yet, where drifting is presented a little more
accurately: rally racing.
Remember when I said Nascars and Formula 1 racers generally don’t drift?
That’s because they're driving on asphalt, which their humongous tires stick to like glue.
But in rally, the tracks can be asphalt or gravel or snow or some combination of all three.
Which is why rally racers powerslide through these hairpin turns. Even if the driver isn’t
accelerating through the whole turn, the drift allows them to maintain most of their speed.
In this instance, it’s faster than the alternative.
You’ll notice this detail in many of the more realistic rally racing series like DIRT
or WRC, or even Forza Horizon.
But I found a real appreciation for it in the minimalist rally racer, Art of Rally.
Obviously, this is not a driving sim, but don’t let the vaporwave aesthetics deceive
you: there are some very advanced driving physics...
under the hood.
[damp, splattering winking]
There’s also a charmingly approachable history lesson integrated into the game, that lets
you experience the progression of rally racing through the decades.
And in doing so, teaches you a valuable lesson: mo' horsepower, mo' problems.
Dune Casu, the developer of Art of Rally, actually went to real life rally school to
make sure he was getting all the game’s details just right.
And from the sound of it, he was thrown right in the deep end.
Dune Casu: They just put you on a stage, got you to go faster and faster and faster and faster.
Yeah, it was very scary, it was terrifying. I almost lost it in the car a couple of times!
- Luckily he lived, and it wasn’t the only school he tried.
Dune Canu: So I went to DirtFish the year after. And that was more of like a start from zero.
Everyone that we did the course with became pretty proficient, we were kind of challenging the instructor
times or beat them sometimes.”
- Casu explained to me the fundamental skill of “blending” acceleration and breaking, which you need
in order to maintain that loss of traction during a drift.
His experience with rally school helped him understand and incorporate that into the game’s
mechanics, along with a very real understanding of the different terrains that rally racers
encounter.
That might seem contradictory to the game’s low-poly smooth surfaces, but there’s a
reason it looks that way: With so much of the visual detail stripped away, it’s easier
to focus on how good the game feels.
Annnnd how good it feels to drift. Which makes a lot of sense: Casu’s previous project
was a game called Absolute Drift.
In Art of Rally, drifting can feel a little unforgiving at first as you spin out of control
or slide off the track completely.
But you gradually learn how to finesse the cars through hairpins and s-curves.
Eventually you’ll start to subconsciously evaluate turns, determining when you need
to brake and how much acceleration your drift can handle, without even thinking about it.
You start to learn when a drift just feels right.
Which is precisely why the game is so satisfying. It reflects the best parts of actual drifting:
the skill, the history, the enticing danger of driving sideways...
all without requiring you to fuck up your own ride.
And while it doesn’t reward you with turbo boost, you won’t win races without mastering it.
Dune Casu: So racing is kind of like, I don't wanna say, boring, but it's pretty mundane compared to
drifting, I like going sideways, it’s just more fun! (laughing)
- Fun is the key word here. It's not that there's something inherently wrong with forgoing realism in
favor of fun.
But sometimes you get a game like Art of Rally that finds that perfect balance between the two.
Where drifting can be fun, and realistic, and very, very cool.
[mmm... that nice vaporwave music heats up]
Jenna do you have any drift names, what should my drift name be?
Jenna, on computer: What? Oh god, a Clayton Ashley drift name is so tricky.
Clayton: Uh, President Drift?
Jenna: Maybe like Archduke Drift?
Clayton: Archduke, yeah, Duke Drift, oh, I like the alliteration of Duke of Drift.
Is there something that's not nobility or authoritarian?
Jenna: COMRADE DRIFT
Clayton: COMRADE DRIFT!