Almost all of us have done it. There’s a moment when you’re carrying just enough speed through a turn. Maybe it’s a wide open intersection or maybe it’s a tight corner you know well. You’re feeling sly, suddenly aware of all your driving talent, and you punch the throttle enough to step the tail out. If it was the first time you’ve done it this afternoon you might immediately lift off and flail at the steering to settle the car back down. If it was midnight in a rainy nowhere you’d probably been doing it for the last half hour and you keep the throttle pinned until the telltale flare of wheel spinning revs levels out, your grin so large it threatens to shatter the side windows. For those few yards, you felt you were drifting.
You weren’t.
And neither was I in those earlier days, though being the only one in my friend group with a rear wheel drive car helped to strengthen the illusion. While everyone else plowed around our ‘secret’ thrash lot in their late model Corollas and hand-me-down Taurus’, I wowed and stunted in my borderline exotic Volvo station-wagon, scrubbing the asphalt with my front tires while a single rear wheel made smoke and eventually spun me around.
Man, that was a cool drift! How come you can do that? Can you teach me how to drift when I get a station-wagon?
I’ve never been cool, but being the guy with a car capable of doing one-tire fires and pitching sideways on the throttle was pretty close. That naive fluffing of my driving ability stuck around for a while. But as I went through cars and started to learn more about car control it eventually became clear that my grasp on real drifting was as strong as Hans Gruber’s grip on Holly’s watch.
Read: Fleeting and not to be relied on.
Which is how I found myself in the seat of a 240SX that looked like all the usual S13s that are coughed out of Craigslist queries across the country. Go ahead, search right now. They’ll all say never raced, adult owned, needs some minor TLC, time-attack/autocross/drift ready. And they’ll all be beat to mess. They’ll all have body panels in three shades of the same color, and at least half of them will have different wheels front and rear. And so it was with this car. Only, thankfully, rather than one of my ill-planned acquisitions this was a student car for the Drift 101 SLIDEWAYZ UNIVERZITY (my embellishment, not theirs).
Finally free of the delusion that drifting was merely over-throttling a turn and managing to miss all the fixed objects I made the commitment and scheduled a Drift 101 two-day course. This step wasn’t particularly easy as they are incredibly busy. Getting ahold of someone to ask even minor questions was an exercise in frustration, though in hindsight I can understand given how many people probably reach out half-heatedly but fall off. If not for previous reviews of the experience available from Everyday Driver and The Smoking Tire I might have even cancelled. That said, if you’re patient and can appreciate seat time and the opportunity to learn as efficiently as your skills allow, keep reading.
Day one of the two-day course was more than I had prepared for. My instructor and the proprietor of Drift 101, Naoki, was short on the introduction. This is not a classroom based school, myself and my two classmates all met at the skidpad we would be using that day. After names had been exchanged Naoki essentially took a pylon, walked out to the middle of the skidpad, set it down and said do a donut.
Of course there was more than that, but not by much. I’d explained during our brief intro that I’d done some messing around in rear wheel drive cars but was otherwise clueless in this facet of car control. I was instructed to line up with the cone on my fender, crank the wheel, rev up the engine and dump the clutch.
With that earlier moment in the intersection and others like it, whether in a secluded parking lot or a remote part of the hills, there’s this buoying feeling of naughtiness. You’re there in your car making a hell of a racket and leaving marks on the tarmac. You know you’re doing bad and you know if you got caught there would be trouble, but oh lord it feels so damn good.
That’s not quite the feeling you get on the skidpad during your first donut, because you won’t hit it. You think you’ve done this before and your mind is playing Tetris with your given directions trying to make a perfect sphere out of your jagged-edged interpretation of the goal. All your pre-conceived notions of controlling a car while sideways come together in a beautiful mess…and you run over the cone.
Again. And again, and again.
This is actually going to be the best part of the Drift 101 experience. Perhaps you’re sitting there laughing at my lack of skill and my belief that you’re probably pretty close to my driving ability, at least in this area. But this is going to be the best part because you won’t know what to do. You will try to force your will upon the exercise. You will try to make the car move the way you want it to because you see it in your mind’s eye. And when your failure to do so makes an audible noise out of your bumper slamming the cone for the umpteenth time, the learning will start.
Over the better part of two days, the second mostly one-on-one instruction, I went from struggling with a basic donut to initiating into a second-gear course. And it’s not just the control techniques you’ll learn about, even the school’s car preparation is something to be learned from. In all disciplines, including drifting, there’s this idea that your car has to have a year’s salary thrown at it before you can use it for your preferred purpose, and that wasn’t the case here. The school’s car had a welded diff, some coilovers, and some cheap tires; that was more or less it. No power mods, no crazy-angle control arm mods. It didn’t even have an aftermarket bucket-seat. My core and shoulders were wrecked after two days of trying to hold myself in place with the stock S13 seat and guillotine ’90s seat belt retractor.
You learn to let go. You learn that the only way to learn is to let go. Everything you think you know is wrong, and even the stuff you knew that was right you still misunderstood. Once you’ve freed yourself of your inaccurate holdings everything comes together. Your throttle foot moves on its own, your hands learn when to aim and where not to aim the steering. A new part of your vision is opened up as you begin to grasp what inputs affect the car’s trajectory and how. And by the very end you might learn to drift.
Having a visual (video) record of the experience was at the bottom of my Drift 101 priority list. But I’m kicking myself for not recording it because the last exercise seems like a dream, almost a lie when I reference it against all my previous driving abilities. I only managed to complete the objective once, and maybe only to a B- grade level, but it defined the whole experience.
The entire second day had been rough because I hadn’t anticipated the fatigue generated by the first day. The basics were slipping, and more than once I had looped the car doing something that had seemingly become second nature the day before. With the sun setting, cones were laid out in a wide arc bisecting the balcony skidpad at Willow Springs Raceway. The goal was simple, initiate into a left hand turn, transition into a wide decreasing radius right-hand arc, and snap it back left to finish it off.
Easy to type, impossible for me to will into execution. First try saw me feint into an E-brake initiation, since that was the method I seemed to have the best grasp on from the earlier exercises.
Looped it. Try again.
Second try saw a well-intentioned clutch kick. Looped it. The third? If only because it seemed easier getting back to the dead-pedal to brace myself I clutch kicked again. Made it half way through the course then looped it.
Again. And again, and again.
I (and Naoki, probably) lost count of how many attempts I failed on, and that I started to spin earlier and earlier in the course made it obvious I was getting frustrated. With a quick cig break and a mindful, intense stare at the course (he did this a lot) Naoki threw an additional cone in toward the end of the arc. Don’t do the last transition till after you clear this cone.
Nailed it.
Okay, so maybe not right after that change, but it was another one of those learning moments that puts everything you just failed at into perspective. No matter how badly you want something, how badly you will it into existence, it won’t appear. You need to learn the basics, how to strategize, and the correct way to put a plan into practice. And just once, I was able to do it. Coming out of the last transition I unwound the wheel and held the throttle down till the tires stopped spinning and accelerated out of the course. For just a moment there was the joy of learning something new.
This is all an unnecessarily long form way of me telling you to hit up Drift 101 and do a class with them. This isn’t paid, and who knows if I’ll ever have the time or patience to take another class. But if you’re able to go in and drop all your driving baggage long enough to learn something there’s a good chance you’ll have a moment where you’re actually drifting.
Now, let’s take a look at those Craigslist 240s….