Drifting is one of the fastest growing high intensity motorsport events today. Its popularity has gained greatly due to the movie The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift and the Japanese Anime series Initial D. And with the organization of the professional drift competitions such as the D1 GP Championships and Formula Drift, the sport has truly gone through great heights from its grassroots beginnings with street racers drifting in mountain passes in Japan during late nights.

The first and foremost requirement for drifting is a rear-wheel drive car. You can forget about drifting if you have a front-wheel drive or an all-wheel drive car. Sure you can do a powerslide with those, but they cannot compete in professional drifting events.

*Popular choices for drift cars would be:

Toyota Corolla Trueno AE86 – a car highly popularized by Drift King Keichi Tsuchiya and Initial D, which was also insipired by Tsuchiya. Downside for this car is its value has increased considerably due to its popularity. The car is hard to find and is also not a very easy car to use for beginners.

Nissan Cefiro A31 – considered as the Honda EG hatch of drifting with its relatively low acquisition cost. The Cefiro is the result of the mating of an S13 and a Skyline. It comes with a stock RB24 engine which you will eventually throw away once you start with your project and swap in any RB engine of your choice with much ease. There are also some who install an SR20DET engine in the Cefiro. This is the drift car for the budget concious.

Nissan S13 – the cheapest Nissan two-door car to drift with. More expensive than the Cefiro, but definitely looks a lot sportier with two doors. Comes in a coupe and fastback iteration. Comes with an SR20DET engine in Japan, but most left-hand-drive models come with KA18 and KA24 engines which you’ll eventually swap with an SR20DET engine, which offers more flexibility and abundance of aftermarket parts.

Nissan S14 – the more expensive Nissan sports coupe, released locally standard with an SR20DET engine, which unfortunately was mated to an automatic transmission. A manual transmission swap is a relatively easy modification for this car. The S14 is a very good drift car and it is easy to power up the engine with bolt-on parts and an increase in boost. As with the S13, parts are very abundant for the S14.

Mazda RX-7 – one of the most stylish cars that can be used for drifting. Unfortunately, the engine does not last very long. There are only a few specialists for the RX-7′s rotary engine in the Philippines. Aftermarket parts are very much abundant in Japan and it is realtively easy to power up the car. Only recommended if you have a big budget.

*Note that the suggested drift cars are those that are available in left-hand drive form in the the Philippines.

To better illustrate how to build a drift car, we at AutoIndustriya.com decided to build a project drift car. Since we wanted to show the basics of building a drift car, we chose one of the most basic vehicles which costs the least. We acquired a 1989 Nissan Cefiro A31 with the help of David Feliciano of DMF Drift Garage, who will also be the one responsible for making initial preparations for the car.

Being a nineteen year-old car, it was not in the best of shape, but the chassis was still in good condition. We first brought to car to Velocity Motors to have the chassis alignment specs checked and readjusted to factory specs as the chassis will have deformed through age. After some minor adjustments, which actually made the car much easier to drive afterwards, the car was ready to be taken apart to begin its new life as a drift car. The chassis alignment step is very much recommended for older cars and especially if you plan on seam-welding the body. A straight chassis is always the best foundation for a project car.

Drifting refers either to a driving technique utilizing a difference in slip angle between the front and rear tires of a car, or to a sport based on the technique. A drift or oversteer occurs when the rear wheels are slipping at a greater angle than the front wheels. The rear end of the car appears to chase the front end around a turn; the driver utilizes both front tires and the rear tires to control the actual direction of the car. More throttle induces more rear wheel slip angle and the rear of the car wants to overtake the front. The goal is for the driver to achieve opposite lock and use the throttle to fine tune the car’s angle and direction.

Oversteer is a technique used in many levels of motorsports, especially ones that run on low grip surfaces such as dirt track rallying and rallying. The art of drifting dates back to even the 1930’s popularized by legendary Italian Grand Prix driver Tazio Nuvolari who utilized the four-wheel drift to take corners at full throttle to exit at the highest possible speed.

Modern drifting started in Japan over 30 years ago in the All Japan Touring Car Championship races as a driving technique of motorcyclist turned driver Kunimitsu Takahashi. He was popular for hitting the apex at high speed and drifting out of the corner preserving a high exit speed.

Takahashi was the inspiration of street racer turned ‘Drift King’ Keiichi Tsuchiya. Tsuchiya began practicing the drifting techniques on the mountain roads of Japan and quickly gained a reputation. In 1977, several magazine publishers got together and decided to produce a video about Tsuchiya’s drifting skills and techniques. The video has since been an inspiration for many of the professional drift drivers today. In 1988, Option magazine founder Daijiro Inada helped organize one of the first drifting events.

Tsuchiya however cleared out his main reason for drifting by a popular quote he made. “I did not drift because it is a quicker way around a corner, but because it is the most exciting way.”

Organized drift events outside Japan formally began in 1996 at the Willow Springs racetrack in California, which was incidentally organized by Option magazine as well. It has since exploded as a popular motorsport in North America, Europe, Australia and in many parts of Asia. Today, several professional drift competitions have sprung out. More popular ones are the D1 Grand Prix, and Formula D. In the Philippines, drifting was formally introduced in 2006 by Burnt Rubber Productions spearheaded by David Felicano, Mon Rayos, and Charlie Cruz.

Feliciano revealed that he only found out about drifting only a few years back, 1999 to be exact. Which he said was quite funny because he found out after many years that drifitng was the way he took the corners on the winding roads of his hometown Antipolo. After much exposure to drifting videos and magazine features, he decided to put together two Toyota AE86 cars and he and his friends started driving the cars up and down the winding roads in the hills of Antipolo. These roads were actually the old special stages they used in rally racing that have now been concreted.

Their plan to officially organize drifting in the country was formed in 2005 when he and Mon Rayos saw the increasing popularity of drifting locally, the duo then got into contract with Charlie Cruz who joined them to introduce the first drifting event in the country called Countersteer with 103.5 K-Lite in January of 2006. Its quite interesting as well that the winner of their first competition could not even get a driver’s lincense. Fourteen year-old Gio Rodriguez who has only been driving for two years.

“We give people a safe venue for drifting so they don’t do it on the street,” said Feliciano. “My advice to people who want to try it is, don’t be scared, it’s not as dangerous as it looks. It only becomes dangerous when you do it on the street,” he added.

For more information about drifting, Burnt Rubber Productions can be contacted through +632.4390262 or +632.4390263.

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