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Originally Posted by ryan7o7
what is drifting?????
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In my state of Australia (NSW) in the last few years, there has been a law against "Sustained loss of traction" which drifting would fall square into the lap of
The law was designed to impound cars of people doing burnouts, but I think the cops would be more than willing to expand the use to street drifters.
Basically it's all about making the car work sideways and sliding, and as other people have pointed out, just getting a bit of power or trailing-throttle oversteer doesn't really qualify. It's more about initiating a slide and controlling the car around the corners in a slide, or even in a straight line. At the more advanced levels the slide is initiated well before the corner, and the top pro's can do all this shit at speeds upto 180km/h or 110mph.
Competition is judged on style rather than timing, although a faster run (all else being equal) is of course more stylish. It's common in competition to drift in tandem with another car, and it's also common to swap paint with each other so don't get into that if you can't afford the repairs.
Currently I'm getting myself comfortable with controlling a power slide and terminating that slide gracefully instead of banging out of it with a wild and hard-to-manage snap of traction. I'm getting happy with my skills so the next step for me would be to initiate the slide on corner entry so that the slide does the slowing and then put on the power to exit. For this I need to find a really large, wide open space with no solid or fleshy objects to hit.
So do I qualify as a drifter? No way, not yet. I think you'd probably be able to call yourself a novice drifter once you can reliably initiate an entry slide and maybe connect two corners together. That's just a hint about qualifications...
All aussies interested in Drift should get the current issue of SPEED magazine - it's got a 25 page intro into the subject.