Drift. Now, you are the master

Cap’n Rich with Signal Auto’s star drifter.

Drifting in its purest form in Japan happens on the street.

Mobile ramen noodle stands make sure that no one drifts on an empty stomach.

If you think this is bad, you should see the back end.

Rich realizes that shabu shabu isn’t the best pre-drift diet.

“The police are at the place of drift,” my guide says, pocketing his cell phone. We are hitting 120 mph on the expressway around Osaka. I’ve been keeping a corner of my eye on the speed needle—in between heart attacks—because while my guide has been ascertaining the logistics of the night with his friends on the other end of the cellular frequency, he’s also handling the R34 Skyline GT-R we’re in. Again, he juggles the phone out of his pocket and starts to punch digits. “Don’t worry,” he says, noticing the bit of worry that I am trying to keep to myself. “I know another place we can go.”

We end up at an intersection that would be deserted and quiet if the drifting community of Osaka had not converted it into a temporary drift park. Instead, it is visually and audibly the complete opposite. The tire screeches are constant and beyond any normal pitch I’ve ever heard. In fact, the onomatopoeic quality of the word “screech” is not enough to describe the decibel and sheer level of pain incited by the tires on these cars. This must be the soundtrack in Hell; I can think of few things worse than the prospect of listening to this din for an eternity. Nails on a chalkboard? Child’s play.

Most of the drifters drive Nissan 180SX’s, S13s, and S14s. The cars are old and all have cracks in either the front or rear bumper, or both. These battle scars are considered standard equipment, along with broken headlamps and taillights, and bald tires. The one flagrant exception to these Japanese demolition vehicles is a black R34 Skyline GT-R that looks like it just came from the showroom floor. My guide, Kousuke Kida, is the President of Signal Auto, which is the biggest tuning company in Osaka. Signal’s slogan is “The Stage of Street” and in keeping with it, Kousuke seems to know everyone here and vice versa.

In a nutshell, these cars drift around two perpendicular traffic islands. Yes, there are drifting competitions inside closed race circuits, but drifting in Japan in its purest form happens on the street. It is illegal. It is dangerous. I don’t recommend it. But what I can’t get over right now is the minimal distance between each sliding car. Drifters tailgate closer than I do in gridlock. Once in a while a car spins out, but there’s no panic. No cussing. And no crashes. The cars behind the spinner steer around the mishap and continue on their merry and very, very crazy way.

And there are lots of people watching all of this. I don’t know whether they know any of the drifters or if it’s just something to do on a Friday night, like going to the movies. However, there is an addictive quality behind drift watching. Despite the repetition and despite the horrific noise, I find it hard to take my eyes off the action. Of course, some drivers are better than others. Those are the ones who stay sideways the longest and basically take their cars closest to smashing the living daylights out of the barriers. But the ones who aren’t as good are even more fun to watch. For me, it’s not the quality of the drift, but the nature of the drifter. OK, I have a slight problem. From where I am standing right now, I cannot get a good action shot of the cars sliding through the intersection. I am too far away, which is also the one good thing going for this location—there’s no chance of getting the pulp squashed out of me by a drift gone awry. But, some journalistically conscious voice from deep within my cerebral cortex reminds me of a phrase I learned back when I first got into this business: “Anything for the shot.” I think it’s coming from the same part of the brain that wants to know what the afterlife is like.

When Kousuke sees me move past the chain link fence, he points out, “That is most dangerous area.” He isn’t kidding. When I look through my camera lens, the headlights look like they’re going to blast through the glass and punch out my eye. But there is a two-feet-high steel barrier between me and the road, and I reason this to be sufficient protection against the swirling mayhem of noise, metal, and rubber on the other side. And almost on cue, the black showroom R34 loses it into the barrier, about 20-feet away from me, wasting its rear end with a harsh crack. The sequence of screeching stops momentarily, but instead of getting out of the car to inspect the damage, the driver guns the throttle and rejoins the circuit. This would be the second scariest thing I would do this night. “You ride inside,” Kousuke says to me after several minutes of watching the action. That’s right, say it with me: What choo talkin’ ’bout Willis? But deep down, I know that this would be the only empirical method of experiencing what drifting is, next to actually doing it, which—like tightrope walking and running a country—is something that I will never be able to do. Besides, how frightening can it be? After all, I’ve been in the back seat of a cab in New York City. Nothing could be more hair-whitening than that. Lucky for me I’ve got that change of shorts in my overnight bag.

My driver is a skinny fellow who’s all arms and legs and mop of black hair; he’s a Japanese Jim Morrison. I strap myself in, and he guns the car forward. I get an instant taste of what drifting is all about: sheer recklessness and irony. Common sense tells us to brake into sharp hairpin turns. Common sense tells us that we want to be in control of the car. But as we hook the first hairpin, I have become a passenger through a strange sort of logic that goes against everything I know. Just by flipping the wheel right and left, and shifting the gears (honestly, I’m just guessing at this point, my eyes were jarred into the backside of my head on the first kick of the throttle), my driver has managed to stop the nose of the car and swing the back end completely in a 180-degree turn. But just as my eyes roll back into place, he guns it again and—deliberately—swings the car side to side as he hits the next turn.

It’s probably a good thing that my eyes can’t process what’s going on. The near-death fear inside the car really belittles the experience watching it from the sidelines. Inside the car, I can’t hear the tire screeches, or I can, but my mind has more important things to dwell on, such as the best position my body should be in when we collide—because my mind is convinced that collision is an inevitability. As I think about all of this, my driver continues to do many things with his hands all at once. And if I could peel my face from the window, where it has been pressed by centrifugal force, I would probably only see the cartoon blur of rapid movement. I swear he’s steering, shifting, and hand-braking all at the same time. It’s like this for the three turns around the intersection, before he swings the car back to the staging island. And I fall out.

Editors Note: In Japan, Rich got a tiny taste of drifting. Recently, he invited Signal Auto’s champion drifter Komatsu to America to teach the staff how it’s done. Super Street rented the police driver training center in Southern California and told the California Highway Patrol that they were going to have a photo shoot. Instead, they drifted, we drifted, Stephan Papadakis drifted, passers-by drifted, well you get the idea. Anyway, a throng of CHP officers gathered to watch which aroused the suspicion of the their sergeant, who busted up the fun. It’s all on tape. Click Here