Hi Guys, I’m Scott Mansell and welcome to
the Driver 61 guide to How to Drift a Road Car. There no doubt about it, drifting looks cool.
Long sideways slides and apart from the rubber bill, what’s not to love? However, most of the videos I’ve seen on
the internet, have shown how to drift in a purpose-built drift car or a high-powered
road car. Well, in this video I’m going to explain exactly how I drifted a standard
2-liter, 200 BHP Toyota GT86. Let me start by saying you should never drift
on the public road - be sensible with this. The best thing to do is to hire an area of
tarmac, which you can do at many race circuits or airfields and lay out some cones and begin
to drift around these. Whilst drifting is fun, it’s also quite
difficult and you’re going to make a few mistakes at the beginning. A road car is more difficult to drift than
a purpose built drift machine, which has tonnes of power, a custom made diff and an E-brake. Road cars are softer, less powerful and more
likely to understeer than drift cars. Therefore, you really need to be aggressive with your
throttle and steering inputs - the opposite to my normal track driving advice! To be able to drift in a road car you’ll
need RWD, and a bit of power, a manual ‘box and the ability to completely disable traction
and stability control. There are 4 stages of drifting: Starting the
drift, where you’ll need to unsettle the rear of the car; maintaining the drift, where
you keep that massive slide going; transitioning the drift, where you go from sliding one way
to the other and exiting the drift, where you gentle bring the car back into a straight
line. Here you can see me drifting the GT86 around
the Yas Marina circuit - look out for the 4 stages of the drift - here we have the start
the start of the drift, notice the aggression with the steering, maintenance, with lots
of acceleration, then a lift and into the transition, back to maintenance, a lift and
back into the maintenance, and finally exiting that drift. So it all happens quite quickly and we’re
just going to watch one more example. A flick in to start the drift, maintenance here, transition
very quickly, into maintenance again - a lot of throttle through this section, again another
transition and this is a hairpin so the drift is continuing for a long time until we finally
come out the corner and exit the drift. Starting the drift is relatively easy. But
because this GT86 doesn’t have so much power, we’re going to have to use more than just
the throttle to get the drift going. Approach the corner with some speed, brake
to transfer some weight to the front and away from the rear, and flick the car into the
corner. What’s weight transfer I hear you ask? Well
in this case when we brake the front of the car will come down and the rear of the car
will come up slightly. When the front of the car comes down, it means that more of the
car’s mass is over the front axel. And again, less is over the rear. When you have more weight over one particular
area of the car, it therefore has more grip. So in this case, we get on the brakes and
more of the weight goes to the front of the car. Therefore, the front has more weight
and more grip. The rear has less weight and less grip. Which means that the rear is lively,
which is what we want for drifting. So let's have a look at things in a little
bit more detail in slow motion in the GT86. We are approaching the corner here, I’m
getting on the brakes, so more weight has moved to the front of the car, than the rear. Therefore, the front has lots of grip and
the rear is nice and lively, which is just what we want. We’re approaching the corner
and I flick the car, quite hard with the steering to disrupt and unsettle the rear, to try and
make it rotate. We’re coming in now, I’ll be coming off
the brakes now and we should begin to feel the car rotate around, you can see the steering
lock is coming off and we are going to put some opposite lock into the car. The car didn’t
rotate fully into a drift initially, so you can see that I turn the car back into the
corner again, before adding more opposite lock as you can see here. And now the car
settles and has the full drifting angle. If you’re too soft with your inputs at this
point, the car will understeer. If you’re too rough, you brake too much or flick the
car in too hard then the rear will come around too quickly and you'll probably spin. It’ll
take you a few attempts to get it right, but try to be conscious of what’s going on around
you and if you spin or understeer, next time either be less aggressive or be more aggressive,
to try and get the car unsettled and into the drift as well as possible. Maintaining the slide is the really fun part
- it’s so satisfying to have the car fully sideways, where it’s really sensitive yet
quite stable. You put the throttle down some more and you get more angle, you lift off
a little bit and the car straightens itself up. The common mistake here is to use too little
throttle, it’s really surprising how much throttle you can put into the car, so as you’re
practicing think about your throttle input and don’t be scared to use too much. When you’re maintaining the drift it’s
really a balancing act between the steering and the accelerator pedal. As you can see
here, I’m putting more lock into it and then adding some opposite lock as the car
rotates, and you really have to feel what’s happening. If the car’s beginning to straighten up,
you can tweak the steering turn the car in a little bt more and give it some more throttle
and you’ll get more angle. If you have too much angle you can just ease
up off the accelrator a slight bit, or release some steering angle and the drift with maintain.
Once you've got the car into the drift and settled, maintaining the drift isn’t actually
that difficult. But what you’ll have to do is refine your steering and throttle inputs,
until you get perfection and the feel so you can keep those long drifts going. The transition is the most tricky part - the
part where you go from drifting one way, to the other. There’s a lot going on, it all
happens quite quickly. Also, the window where the transition has the right amount of force
is quite small. This part will take a lot of practice, transition
too hard and the car will spin, too soft and you’ll push to understeer. When you’re
practicing just make sure you’re aware of the mistakes you make, so on your next attempt
you can try to correct them on your next attempt. So the trick when transitioning is to almost
over rotate the car - to a point where you can only just bring it back. So, looking at
the detailed footage here, you can see that I just bring in a bit more angle here, before
I’ll lift off the accelerator so the rear tyres will grip up slightly and throw the
car into the opposite direction. As you can see here I’ve lifted, turned
the car into the right and now the car’s transitioning. You can see all of the weight
transfer and the car leaning over to the left. I’ve let go of the steering wheel so it’s
spinning around and at this point, we just have to try to catch the steering wheel, so
that we’re at the right steering angle for the drift and get back on the accelerator
very hard so that we can go back into maintenance mode and keep the drift going. So you can
see here now I’ve collected everything up and we’re back into a right-hand drift. Now this section, as I’ve mentioned, is
quite difficult to get the transition perfect. But with practice, you’ll get there. Letting
go of the steering wheel is also quite a difficult thing to get used to, but you have to do it,
in this case, in a transition, because the steering wheel spins around so quickly. If the circuit is right you can go from drift
to transition to drift to transition to drift until you run out of tyres, but, what's more
likely is that you’ll want to straighten up and exit the drift at some point. Much like the transition, this is a tricky
part. The car is fully loaded up, and you’ll need to release that load smoothly. Basically, in this fairly low powered GT86,
to exit the slide you just allow the slide run out. This happens as you open out the
line and the steering. The car doesn’t have enough grunt to maintain a lot of angle. So, if we just fast forward the video here
we have one more transition in this section, which I won't go over. We get the car into
maintenance and here you can see I’ll be accelerating really hard, in the video you’ll
notice that I’m almost on the limiter on the GT86. The point where the car starts to grip back
up again, is here and we taking the lock out of the car, bringing it into more of a straight
line as we exit the slide. Now, the trick is just to get the steering
input or releasing the steering angle, at the correct time as the grunt of the car runs
out and it naturally wants to grip up and go back in a straight line again. So let's watch that again all again, so you
can get a feel for drifting now you understand the detail. We’re approaching this left-hander, we getting
on the brakes about now, flicking the car in, back on the gas, maintaining the slide,
maintaining the slide, a lift off the accelerator, let the car flick the another way, get the
angle back and back on the gas. Again, another transition, then we gently bring the steering
back in a straight line as we exit the drift. So once again. On the brakes, flick the car
in, back on the throttle to maintain the drift and then we lift, allow the car to drift in
the opposite direct, get back on the throttle, keep the drift going, then we lift, let the
car flick the opposite direction, pick the accelerator up again, we’re looking toward
the exit point here, and as the grip naturally comes back in, we straighten the steering
up. So, that’s the Driver 61 guide to how to
drift a road car - please enjoy and remember do not practice on the public road. For the full article and to download the free
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