Drifting

On a cool December night at the California Speedway in Fontana, 15,000 fans watch as two turbocharged cars--one with an American driver, the other a Japanese--roll alongside each other and gun their engines to a full growl over a quarter-mile straightaway in what could be a drag race but soon takes on the look and sound of something that usually ends in a gathering of police cars, ambulances and maybe the Jaws of Life. At 100 miles an hour at the end of the straight, both drivers pull their emergency brake to loosen their rear wheels, then crank their machines side by side into a right-hand skid, throwing up great screeching plumes of tire smoke. Seconds later they reverse the turn at full power into a screaming 90-mile-an-hour fender-to-fender left-hand slide, fighting to stay sideways without crashing into each other or the wall. Then it's right again, still skidding, still close enough to spit on each other, heading through a wild final turn and ending sidelong across the finish line. While a double snake of pure white smoke floats the taste of rubber over the wildly yelling crowd, three judges pick a winner, their decision based not on who crossed the line first but on how elegantly and powerfully the car was charged through the course entirely sideways.

They call it drifting, a far too gentle name for a rubber-eating dance that distills the most dramatic situations of rally, drag and NASCAR racing into a few hairy moments. They've been doing it for more than 35 years in Japan, where drifting began on twisting mountain roads and in recent years evolved into a hugely popular track sport. Drifting has been performed in the U.S. for only a couple of years, and American drivers are scrambling to catch up with the breakaway skills and banzai daring of the Japanese pros. This Fontana contest is only the second Japanese-versus-American championship. The previous Saturday, in Irwindale, California, the green American drifters worked to hone their technique in order to qualify for the big go-sideways-or-go-home event.

This afternoon in 2004, under a hot, dry southern California winter sun, only a couple hundred people are in the stands as 40 drivers vie for a spot at Fontana. In the pit area, four- and five-man crews prep the sponsor-stickered high-gloss machines for their runs around an oval track that portable concrete barriers and orange highway cones have reconfigured into a series of brutally tight turns. Most drifting cars are hopped-up rear-wheel-drive Japanese models (Nissans, Toyotas, Mazdas, etc.) that give racers the power and control to get sideways and stay that way. The Irwindale track was designed to allow drivers to start on the backstretch of the half-mile oval, gain speed around a long south turn and then whip hard into a high-speed right-left-right-left skid combination that includes a hairpin. A clean run with no spinouts or wall kisses should take less than 30 seconds, with some variations, depending on the track layout.

Only 16 Irwindale drivers will qualify for next week's D1GP All-Star Exhibition, which will feature side-by-side tandem races. Today's trials will be individual runs scored for speed, control and showmanship by three judges, including the Drift King, Keiichi Tsuchiya, who, until his retirement, dominated the sport in Japan.

Drifting began sometime in the mid-1960s, as Tsuchiya, who was an accomplished driver in GT, rally and Le Mans racing, began running mist-covered, snowy mountain roads in Japan by sliding his car through tight corners at ever-higher speeds. To this day, hundreds of amateurs still go weekend drifting on the mountain passes near Tokyo and Osaka, where the sport is called touge--and it's purely illegal. Tsuchiya, in fact, lost his driver's license for his well-documented outlaw driving, at the same time spawning a legend as a rebel and the father of what would become a celebrated legitimate track sport in Japan. By the time he retired, in 2004, the then 48-year-old Tsuchiya was the uncontested champion of the professional D1 drifting circuit. His instructional videos, Drift Bible and Drifting 101, illustrate his most famous quote: "I drift not because it is a quicker way around a corner but because it is the most exciting way."

On this day at Irwindale the smiling, affable Drift King watches as, one after another, American drivers fill the track with smoke and screech. Many oversteer into 360-degree spinouts; others tick or smash the wall in attempts to maintain their speed. I wince as racers trying to hold the sidelong edge lose to spinning chaos. Unlike stock-car racing or Indy sleds going round and round with dramatic moments here and there, drifting is furious business. Disaster threatens at every second as drivers try to avoid losing points by preventing their car from going straight ahead--the way more than 100 years of engineering has designed it to go.

"It's hard on these cars," says Lane Zemba, one of the pit crew for the team sponsored by Rotora, a high-performance-brake manufacturer. "Cars are not designed to go sideways. The chassis is (continued on page 118)Drifting(continued from page 76) always tweaked. You have to constantly adjust the suspension and constantly tune the motor because the RPMs are run so high."

And of course you have to change tires. On a hot day, five runs is about as long as a $400 set of widetracks can last. Unsurprisingly, tire companies are heavily represented among the sponsors. Rotora's car is a 1991 Nissan 180SX with custom bodywork and a powerful SR20DET engine modified to deliver more than 450 horsepower. "It was a rust bucket when we bought it for about $5,000," says Loren Ho, Rotora's 33-year-old vice president of sales and marketing. "We redid pretty much everything and have about $65,000 in it, not counting labor."

Atypical for most motor sports, buying and rebuilding a rust bucket is common in drifting because older, out-of-production rear-wheel-drive Japanese models like the Nissan 240SX and Toyota Corolla GTS have the balance and handling qualities crucial for highspeed tail sliding. Prices on these used cars continue to escalate, and the supply is dwindling. Ho estimates that if his team had bought their rust bucket today, the car would have cost from 50 to 200 percent more than they paid in January 2004.

Rotora's driver, Ernie Fixmer, started drifting pretty much the way the Drift King and most other Japanese and American drifters did: illegally. He was in the Marines, stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa, spending his time off clubbing. One night he was riding with a friend who owned a Nissan Skyliner that he had begun drifting.

"I'd seen him working on his car and heard him talk about drifting. I was riding with him and asked, 'What's up with this stuff, anyway?' The next thing I knew we were sideways on the street," remembers the shy, serious driver, 29 years old, who has a leatherneck haircut and carries himself as if a sergeant might be watching. "That was all I needed. After that I started asking what kind of car I should get."

Fixmer had to extend his Okinawa tour by a year to get a Japanese driver's permit. He then bought a Toyota Corolla for about $2,000, put in a new clutch and headed for the narrow mountain roads on the north end of the island. "It was safe up there, and there were no cops. After a while I was out three or four nights a week, four hours a night. I was in a drifting trance," he says.

Back in the U.S. Fixmer took a fulltime job as an electrician, rebuilt a Nissan 240SX hatchback and began competing in amateur drifting contests in southern California. Team Rotora took him on as its number one driver in 2003.

As Fixmer and I talk between runs, the only female driver in the event comes into the first turn; she spins wildly and ends against the concrete wall. The sound of the crash is awful, but thanks to reinforced roll cages, most track-competition drifting collisions leave drivers with minor bruises or less. A fatality has never occurred in a drifting event. Verena Mei is unhurt and smiling when I talk to her later in the afternoon.

"I'm fine, but I'm a little worried about my car," says the petite 24-year-old Asian American. She grew up in Hawaii, and her modeling career was her entry into racing. "I was the Toyo Tires model for three years, going to all the races, signing posters, getting to know all the drivers. When I said I wanted to learn to race, most of the guys said I'd never make it. Bobby Unser Jr. recommended me for the Motion Picture Stunt Driving Clinic, and one of the things I learned there was how to drift." Mei, who is also a National Hot Rod Association--licensed graduate of the Frank Hawley Drag Racing School, is one of very few women--including a group called Drifting Pretty--who compete with the boys. The Irwindale event is only her third drifting contest. Because of her crashed car, she doesn't qualify today; she is, however, already ahead of the young men in chasing the sponsorships that help pay for track time and equipment.

"Because of the media attention I had around racing, a lot of industry people knew me, so I was able to attract sponsors and build a project car, work on it, drive it and learn how it handles," she says, flashing the smile that put her onto thousands of tire-company posters. And in the unlikely event that her modeling, stunt-driving, drag-racing or drifting careers stall, the relentlessly spirited Mei has yet another option: She went to improv-comedy school.

Despite kissing the wall on his second-to-last run, Fixmer qualifies for the D1 event, and he agrees to take me on a ride-along during the run-up to the Fontana competition.

•

Fontana's California Speedway contains a two-mile oval with a 92,100-seat grandstand surrounding garages, offices and several infield raceways that can be set up in various configurations. The drifting competition has been piggybacked onto the premiere U.S. running of the All-Japan Grand Touring Championship. The JGTC, which attracts huge crowds at home, features production-based Toyotas, Hondas, Porsches, BMWs, Ferraris and other cars specially modified and tuned at costs of up to a million and a half dollars each. The centerpiece of GT Live, as the weekend is billed, is a 200-mile race featuring 25 of Japan's hottest teams.

On Wednesday 70-mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds ravage Fontana's desert neighborhood. Six big rigs are blown onto their sides on the highways. American flags the size of movie screens are shredded. I meet the Rotora team in the drifters' garage, where they are tinkering with an engine that has been suffering small fainting spells at times when quick power is needed. They have decided to change the computer unit that controls and balances many of the car's systems. Fixmer isn't feeling well either. He is fighting flu symptoms that have made him sullen as I am strapped into the seat next to him.

Putting on a fireproof suit and helmet and then clicking into racing safety belts gets my adrenaline up before the car even moves an inch. My longest experience with this ritual was at drag-racing school years ago, when I learned to control something that sounded like a bomb and took off like shrapnel when I put the gas pedal to the floor.

When Fixmer punches it I am surprised at how close the g-forces feel to a dragster's drive-the-blood-out-of-your-eyes acceleration. These hot little cars deliver explosive power through each gear. By the time we make the sweeping run into the first of four turns, it feels as if we're doing between 60 and 70 miles an hour. I find my focus tunneling through the windshield into the first turn, which comes up way too fast. From the moment Fixmer cranks us hard sideways, it is all smoke being sucked into the car, along with a bloodcurdling tire squeal and the high, roaring pitch of engine. Fixmer uses a combination of clutch, gears, brakes and accelerator to swing furiously from a right- to a left-hand skid with a force that wants to pitch me out of the window and into the upper rows of the empty grandstand. The one breath I take tastes of burning rubber, and the fright and thrill wash over me in the same kind of blood rush I've ridden in years past, when I've ice climbed, skydived, ski jumped, wing walked, bungeed and paraglided in a series of articles for this magazine. Feeling, not thought, is what runs the ship in this weather. I don't need a speedometer to know I am riding the screaming edge between Wow and Ooooh, shit! I love it.

"Put another quarter in," I say as we park.

"I didn't get it near sideways enough," Fixmer says in a dour tone, which seems to suggest that both he and the car will have to get well before the weekend.

By midweek most of the Japanese racers have yet to arrive, but the U.S. drivers and crews are there, tuning their own cars. The American drivers are a disparate bunch, most in their early or mid-20s, but Ken "the Gush" Gushi is 18 on this day in Fontana. Although most fans and aspiring racers are introduced to the sport through online video games like Initial D and Need for Speed Underground, the Gush started behind a real steering wheel when his feet barely reached the pedals.

"I started driving when I was nine," says the five-foot-10 kid, who wears a small gold earring in his left ear. "My dad started drifting in Okinawa, then moved the family here when I was a year old. When I was 13 he took me out on one of the dry lakes to teach me to drift in a 1986 Corolla. From there I started going to local drifting events."

At the age of 17 Gushi won the richestever American drifting prize, $10,000 at the Laguna Seca Shoot-Out. Despite his young start behind the wheel and his drifting stardom, he has never had a driver's license. "That's because I was caught street drifting in the City of Industry when I was 15, then again at 16. So now I'm suspended from getting a license till I'm 21," he says. "It's a drag."

Gushi works on anti--street-drifting campaigns promoted by various drift organizations trying to turn the sport's image away from the illegal origins that bred many of its best American drivers.

"I started messing around on mountain roads in Hawaii, then in Marin County, California," says 30-year-old Alex Pfeiffer when we talk in the Fontana garage. "Drifting was new enough that the cops in Marin weren't even sure what it was. They didn't actually catch us doing it, but they saw all these tire marks through the hairpin corners. This one cop came up to me and said, 'I don't know what the hell you guys are doing, but I know it's not safe.'"

Pfeiffer showed himself just how unsafe it could be during one of his night outings on a two-lane road through the Marin redwoods. "I hit a mountainside at about 110 miles an hour, totaled the car and got a nice DUI out of it. Cost me about $15,000."

According to southern California police, street racing (especially drag racing) and its accompanying injuries and fatalities have risen sharply since the release of The Fast and the Furious and its sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious. It's no surprise that the series's latest incarnation is called The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Street drifting, especially on mountain roads like Mulholland Drive and Topanga Canyon Road, as well as in some industrial districts, has become prevalent enough that police have begun to look out for the Japanese cars that are drifter favorites. When refitted with high-horsepower Japanese engines, those vehicles are not street legal, because they can't pass pollution-control tests. While learning to spot the difference, cops carried photos of the outlaw engines to compare with what they saw under the hood. If the engine matched the photo, they would impound the car.

Not all the American drivers came into the sport with street racing on their record. Several, including Tanner Foust, moved into drifting from other motor sports. Foust has eight years' experience as a rally and formula racer and teaches ice driving to police, Navy Seals and Secret Service agents part-time.

"Drifting and ice driving are similar," he says, "because you're always at the grip limit or beyond it. The unique thing about drifting is that it's so visceral. You see these cars get sideways at 100 miles an hour, you hear the tires scream, see fire shoot out of the exhaust and watch the smoke fill the inside of the car and roll up over the fences. It's very intense, primal stuff. Whether you like it or hate it, you can't take your eyes off it."

As we talk, the sound of squealing tires followed by a hideous crash comes from somewhere on Foust's body. "That's my cell phone," he says, taking it from his pocket. "It makes people's heads snap around. Sometimes when I'm driving it even makes my heart jump."

We talk about drifting's young fan base. "I'm 31 trying to pass for 23," Foust says, laughing. "Fifteen-to-20-year-olds are the core of it. And the amazing thing is how Internet savvy they are and what that means to the sport. You could go online right now and there'd be chat about the practice session that happened 20 minutes ago. Pictures and everything. And because the information disseminates so fast, manufacturers and sponsors get instant gratification from the audience they're aiming for."

The script lettering painted across the rear of Foust's car reads blood, sweat and tires.

•

When the gates are opened on Saturday morning for the dual event, drift fans arrive by the thousands. They wander into a theme park set up by manufacturers and sponsors for a new generation of car crazies called tuners. These are the grandchildren of the custom-car hot-rodders who lowered, chopped, channeled, pinstriped and otherwise modified their Fords and Chevys 50 years ago. The tuners who gather around drifting use sport compacts--Hondas, Nissans, Acuras, Mazdas--to express their independent spirit with technical and cosmetic touches from bumper to bumper. The results are quirky--even cartoonish in the case of the Scion xB, a squat, square buggy that has the profile of a midget milk truck.

The 40 or 50 infield booths offer accessories that tuners save their money for: custom wheels, radiators, pistons, exhaust manifolds, handmade seats, brakes, neon-color shock absorbers, magazines, videos, video games and die-cast replicas of cars like theirs. The Drift King sits smiling, signing posters for the long line at his table, where shirts, videos and other Drift King merchandise are sold as well. There is even a small track layout where half a dozen people at a time can race remote-control drift cars that are also for sale. Race queens--Japanese girls in Naugahyde boots and shorts or miniskirts--sign posters and pose for photos alongside tire-company big rigs.

On Saturday afternoon Formula D, a new alliance of American drifters that held its first four meets in 2004, gathers its 16 drivers to give a drift demonstration on the course set between the bleachers at the south end of the infield. While the JGTC cars scream round the long oval, about 6,000 spectators watch as the American drivers, one at a time, slide and spin and fill the air with the taste of rubber. The show ends with all the cars doing doughnuts, swarming like bees around each other.

On Sunday morning in the pit garage, Japanese drivers and crews work on their cars; just a short wall separates them from the Americans. The rivalry between the Americans and Japanese is important to both. All are trying to grow the sport in this country, and the friendship between the two teams is warm and open. The main event is scheduled for seven o'clock that night. Engine roar means that all conversation has to be yelled. Fixmer is feeling better. As he listens to the revs, he thinks a last-minute computer-board switch-out has the Rotora car hot and ready.

Down the line, Rhys Millen and his crew are making final tweaks on the only American muscle car in the field, a Pontiac GTO. Millen, who has just arrived from his film stunt-driving job--behind the wheel of the General Lee in the Dukes of Hazzard movie--rebuilt the car in his own shop and is hoping for the kind of showing that would encourage more American auto manufacturers to build and sponsor drift cars. His record as a drifter is impressive and includes a decent showing in the only previous U.S. meet, in Irwindale in 2003, when Japanese D1 pros skated away with the competition. Tenuous hopes are that at least one of the green Americans can make it past the first round tonight.

There is a chill in the air by the time the practice and qualifying rounds begin under the lights flooding three nasty turns on a portion of the track. Fifteen thousand spectators fill the nearby grandstands and line the fences along the course. The drivers start at the head of a quarter-mile straightaway, which should allow them to gather screaming speed by the time they have reached the white cone marking the first clipping point, where they will have to crank into a viciously tight right turn. Sideways now, at speeds clocked at 100 miles an hour for some of the Japanese drivers, they have a fraction of a second to get sideways on their left in front of the three judges and then head into a gentler right to conclude the course. The qualifying runs, done solo and judged for speed, power, drift angle, line and style, will pare the field to eight Japanese and eight Americans, who will be matched head-to-head for the tandem runs. Judging in both solo and tandem events focuses on speed into the first turn, sideways drift angle and style. Ultimately the call is as subjective as in Olympic ice dancing, and the decisions are sometimes controversial.

The Japanese begin the qualifying races. From the first, you can feel the 400-plus horsepower of the attack, which sounds as if the cars are chewing the pavement by the first turn. From there on, some drivers spin out or off the course, and the best of them connect the alternating slides with a rhythm and grace that can be traced in the air on a smoke trail. In their qualifying runs, the Americans answer with an energy I haven't seen from them before, particularly Rhys Millen, Ernie Fixmer, Chris Forsberg and Alex Pfeiffer.

The qualifiers are announced and matched; each pair will make two runs, alternating the lead and follow positions, one driver following the other's line as closely as possible. Tactics for the outside-lane drivers are to try to block the inside car and make it lose speed. The inside driver should try to pass below the outside car or perhaps force it to spin out.

In the first set of tandem runs, Pfeiffer and Ken Maeda stay so close to each other that the audience takes its drift-event prerogative by chanting "One more time," thus bringing about a sudden-death third run. It is a close one, a high-speed auto tango, and when they finish, the two drivers roll to a stop, side by side in front of the judges, to wait like gladiators for an emperor's decision on who will survive into the second round: Maeda. A disappointed noise rises from the crowd.

Chris Forsberg, in a front-bumperless Nissan Z33, is the first American to advance. Young Ken Gushi slides hard off course in both of his first runs and is eliminated.

As I watch, it occurs to me that the shorthand coaching advice for drifters could be simply "You're crashing. Don't crash."

Fixmer, matched against Kazuya "Chunky" Bai, a portly former outlaw drifter from Osaka, comes in hard on the follow and loses it to a 360 in his first run. In the second, with Fixmer on the outside, Bai cuts it too close at the first clipping point and slams loudly and violently into Fixmer's blue Nissan 180SX, sending it spinning off the course. The standing crowd cheers loudly through the drifting smoke at the crash and its result. Under D1 rules, Bai is disqualified, and Fixmer, whose car is not badly damaged, advances.

The most ferocious battle of the first round is between Massao Suenaga and Rhys Millen. With Millen following, the two come into the first turn carrying huge speed, looking like horses in a brace. Millen keeps his loud yellow GTO V8 tightly under Suenaga's Mazda FD3S RX-7, and the pair squirrels through the turns, staying with each other at full power past the last cone. The advantage goes to Millen, who spins out in a furious second round, provoking the crowd to chant again for "one more time." On the third run, Millen holds his sideways line better than Suenaga, and the judges give him the win, which, to the crowd's loud delight, puts a third American in the second round.

Two of the U.S. drivers are eliminated in that second round. Nobuteru Taniguchi runs away from Forsberg; then bracket placement cruelly pits the other two Americans, Fixmer and Millen, against each other. Their first run is the best of the night for speed, smooth side-to-side transitions and an almost magnetic fender-to-door proximity throughout. The GTO has the best roar and was tuned for exactly that. "The judges like to hear the engines at high RPM through the run. We emphasized that sound," Millen tells me later.

Millen leads the second run, which is almost as hard-charging as the first, except that he ticks a cone, which should give Fixmer the win. It doesn't. The judges either didn't see or ignored the foul and give the win to Millen over heavy crowd booing.

In the semifinal, Millen lines up against Youichi Imamura, who has easily dominated his opponents all night. This is it: two cars--one American, the other Japanese--rolling next to each other through a quarter-mile straight. Into the first turn, at speed, the two stick to each other like paint to a wall and fill the air with a thick smoke curl that looks as if it's coming from one car. The second run produces the same loud, tight fender dance; when this ends, the win could go to either man. It goes to Imamura. He loses in a less dramatic final to Nobushige Kumakubo, who takes the champagne and the $5,000 first prize.

As the fans make their way to the parking lots, slapping at the rubber specks that cling to their jackets and hats, their mood is high. There is proud jabber about Millen's third-place finish and Fixmer's gritty runs. Internet chat rooms no doubt report that the Americans surprised everyone with their strong and much improved showing in a sport they should be good at. Drifting combines things Americans believe in: a little art, a lot of flash and everything your father told you not to do in a car.

Drifting Made Easy

1 Drifting is Controlled Fishtailing. The Idea is to Lose Rear-Wheel Traction and make the car go Sideways, with the Driver Still in Command.

2 To start a Drift, Punch the Brakes or Pop the Clutch as you Enter a turn. Reapply the Throttle and turn the wheel. The rear tires should spin.

3 Another Trick: Pull the parking brake at full speed while turning the wheel.

4 Once you start to Drift, Keep your Foot on the Throttle. Steer into the Direction you're Sliding.

I am surprised at how close the g-forces feel to a dragster's drive-the-blood-out-of-your eyes acceleration.