Driving 101: Drifting

Submitted by Drew Hahn on Mon, 2009-12-28 08:00

So far in our Driving 101 lessons you've learned about mastering corners and the racing line; it's time to step it up a notch.

Today we're going to teach you a little about drifting in SHIFT. Hopefully the tips you get today will help you become a better drift driver. A while back we gave this same tutorial in the Need for Speed Podcast but to save you some time, here are our top six tips to drifting in SHIFT:

1. Pick your car
Make sure you try out a few different rear wheel drive cars to see which one feels best for you. I actually prefer to drift with a stock Nissan 370Z and more recently the Toyota Supra Mark IV. Not all cars are created equal so make sure you try out a few different ones in Quick Race.

2. Successful drifting involves counter-steering
Once you're at speed and enter the turn make sure you counter steer in the direction you want to go once your tires have lost grip. So if you're in a long left turn, you want your wheels to be pointed right. Pretty straight forwards right?

3. Learn how to achieve the perfect clipping points
When you're drifting, you want to be as close to the walls as possible and have nice clean transitions from one turn to the other. Come into a turn as close to the wall as possible then come out of the turn wide. This will allow you to enter the next turn close to the wall. Being close to the wall and getting clean transitions between turns will get you the big points.

4. Control the throttle!
Full throttle is almost never advised when drifting. What you want to do is use about half the throttle off the line and slowly increase to gain speed. However, once you enter the turn you really need to control the throttle. You'll be tempted to giver' full but that will just spin out your car. What I find works best is tapping the throttle but that's me and you may be comfortable with a different method.

5. Know the course
This really applies to any type of racing but when it comes to drifting, knowing the course will really help you rack up the points. Once you know the course you'll know where the clipping points are and when you start transitioning from one turn to another.

6. PRACTICE!
Drifting isn't something that you can master in a day. Be sure to practice a lot to increase your skills.

We also have a very special treat for you today. A little while back I got to go down to Irwindale, CA and attend the Formula D finals. While I was there I was able to sit down (actually lean) and chat with Vaughn Gittin Jr. (known as "JR") about drifting in SHIFT. If you don't know, JR actually worked on the drift physics in SHIFT. He put in over one hundred hours to make drifting in SHIFT as authentic as it could be.

When I talked with him, I asked him to give us some drifting tips and here's what he said:

Now get back on there and try out some of these tips!

- NFSDrew