For the Ultimate Lesson in Car Control, Go Drifting
Part of this car writing job is illustrating stories with exciting photos. So, we take pictures of us driving cars, and those pictures should depict something thrilling. We need to slide the cars. That’s a weird job requirement! Pulling off powerslides, on command, for the cameras, in a borrowed car. Often a very fast and expensive car that would be A-Big-Damned-Problem if it found its way into a guardrail. Or ditch. Or off a mountainside.
Formal training is a necessity. I went to see the best.
I was not going to Japan, the birthplace of drifting, but the mountains of Georgia’s moonshine country. Winter still clung to Dawsonville, GA, hometown of NASCAR’s Bill and Chase Elliot, and I was headed to the luxury atmosphere of Atlanta Motorsports Park. It’s the American base for Formula Drift pro Federico Sceriffo, and where he teaches.
Sceriffo is extravagantly Italian. Parked near us as we chat is his Formula Drift competition car, “Fiorella.” It’s a Ferrari 599 with its radiator in the trunk and a turbocharger as big as a basketball sitting ahead of its gargantuan 1000-horsepower V-12. It is one-of-one, and the red-white-and-green of the Italian tricolore emblazons it like a racing stripe. Also, there’s a little Italian flag waving from the roof. But I am here because of his connection to Japan.
Sceriffo was the first foreigner to compete in Japan’s top professional drift series D1GP. And the training course for the day is certified by Japan’s first professional drift team, Team Orange.
There are many teams in motorsports – think Team Penske and Team Joests – but in drifting nothing is as old or as established as Team Orange. And Team Orange took Sceriffo under its wing more than a decade ago. Today, he is the only person authorized to teach Team Orange’s training system outside of Japan.
The instructions appear deceptively straightforward. A single-page printout shows three maneuvers: a donut, a handbrake turn, and a figure eight. Those three tricks are the drifting fundamentals.
The Donut
My school car is simple, and not unlike the school cars seen at a performance driving or rally school. It is an E46 BMW, a 330ci with not much over 200 horsepower. “Maybe 230,” Sceriffo clarifies, “but a short final drive from a diesel.” Most of the interior is gone, but there is a cage, a harness, and a racing seat for driver and passenger. Not that Sceriffo would be sitting right-seat with me. He tells me confidently that it is the goal of an instructor to be able to know so well how a student is driving that he can instruct not only from just looking at my driving, but that he will be able to tell me exactly what I am doing wrong in the car with his back turned to me. The sound alone will be enough for him to tell me over a walkie talking what I am doing wrong. Okay, sensei!
This is a two-day private lesson from Sceriffo, and day one is devoted to donuts, using the handbrake/clutch/brake together, and connecting from one turn to another. Day two is synchronizing everything to high speed and, my progress permitting, a possibility of graduating up to drive Sceriffo’s freshly-built Maserati Quattroporte party car, Olympia.
Doing donuts is familiar territory, and it honestly reminds me most of my training at Team O’Neil Rally School years ago in a Ford Fiesta. What is true in a front-wheel-drive car is, and this might sound sacrilegious, also true of rear-wheel-drive cars. Going in a circle around a cone, more throttle pushes the car wider, lifting off brings it in. I remember to look where I want to go, and my feet and hands follow along. I’m doing fine, but Sceriffo reminds me: Keep the revs up! Make the engine sing! The more you do it, the happier the car will be.
The Handbrake Entry
The next step is the handbrake entry, which initially seems daunting. Sceriffo breaks it down into distinct phases that the mystery out of it.
The first job is to simply set up a few cones like you were making a mock parking spot. Drive up, get the car sideways with the handbrake, and dynamically, instantly parallel park the car in that spot. After a few tries, I get the feel of the car, conscious of where the rear tires need to be, not just the fronts.
The next challenge is where the magic happens – combine those first two exercises. Use the handbrake to slide into the space where you were doing a donut, then just continue the donut. That’s the trick! The mystery of the handbrake turn disappears, and before I know it I am entering into a drift, and sliding through it.
It's not simple, even if it is straightforward. The handbrake turn is a tornado inside the car – turn in with the steering wheel with your left hand, clutch in with your left foot, pull the handbrake with your right hand to get the car sideways, then brake with your right foot to slow it down to the right speed, countersteering, and then getting back off the clutch and the brake and onto the throttle, looking through the turn the whole time. Speed up! Revs up! Don’t be afraid of the handbrake, really use it! Now faster! Again! I need two heads to do it right, three feet and three arms.
Learning to drift is not the same as learning how to powerslide. Getting the rear of a car to step out under power is not drifting. Drifting is the process of getting the car sideways in exactly the right spot, with a precise amount of angle and, only then, powering out of it. It’s not just throwing a car sideways, mashing the gas, and hoping for the best. In a forgiving car, like this BMW, you may get away with that.
“There are still drivers, even in Formula Drift, who are rolling the dice every time they enter,” Sceriffo tells me. Drifting is easy to fudge, and not everybody gets it right, even people doing this for a living.
The Figure Eight Transition
The pinnacle of my training is to pull off a transition – connect one turn to the next. This means going from a donut to a figure-eight, coming in on the handbrake, sliding around a cone, then another handbrake turn to link around another cone in the opposite direction. All it entails is repeating those same steps again, but there is something deeper to it.
Sceriffo’s earlier reminders are critical – use the revs of the engine, the speed of the car, and this will be easy. If you don’t, it’ll be impossible. Sure enough, I keep spinning out in the second half of my figure-eight. I must trust Sceriffo’s words beyond what feels right.
Go faster – now when I pull my handbrake turn, the car has more momentum, more time for me to go through all my motions. Revs up – now when I lift off the throttle there is a more extreme shift in the weight of the car, helping it unload the rear suspension, load up the front tires, and turn in. By the end of day one, I am comfortable, blowing kisses to the camera, and playing with the gas pedal to make the car sing. Sceriffo tells me he’s proud, but in his words I hear a warning. This BMW is driving with training wheels. Doing everything right, step by step, makes the car easier to drift. Tomorrow, it will be critical. I’ll do everything right, or I won’t go at all.
Day two means stepping up in speed. Top of second gear, highway speed. Pay no mind that it’s driving rain.
The more I drive, the more impressed I am. Not impressed in myself but in Sceriffo. He is giving me instructions over the radio, his back turned to me as I drive. He can hear the tone of the engine and know how fast I’m going, hear the screech of the tires and know how long I’m holding the handbrake, listen again to the revs and hear that I’m not dipping enough into the power, or feathering it for my transition.
So many times I spin out and then, sitting in the car, do I replay all my errors like rewinding a cassette tape. What went wrong? Oh, I lifted off the gas before I turned back with the wheel not after. Oh, I let the engine run flat to redline rather than feathering it in the mid-range. Oh I did all the right steps but not in the right order, or I didn’t pull the handbrake long enough, or I wasn’t fast enough, or I wasn’t keeping my eyes up enough. All these techniques – these are the same things you learn in any kind of high-performance driving. The fundamentals are the same for any kind of car control. I’m learning to drift specifically, but across the board I’m practicing performance driving.
Sceriffo gives me a ride in Olympia ahead of me taking it for a spin and I see – or hear – better what he has been trying to teach me. Side to side he throws the car, almost without the steering wheel. He loads up the back tires and then releases. Loads them up and releases, the car switching left to right as he does so. I look over and he has one hand off the wheel, conducting the engine with an invisible wand. He is playing this Maserati like a violin.
My few laps in Olympia are daunting. It’s an animal of a car, four seats but built like a true race car, stripped and caged. The V-8 doesn’t roar; it barks. Hard on the gas and it digs into the pavement, angry. A moment too late in one of my motions and the car spears forward, understeering against itself, the back wheels pushing the front ones forward in the long wheelbase. Only when I concentrate, repeat to myself Sceriffo’s instructions, does the car start to work with me, work for me. A long pull on the handbrake and I’m drifting it, catching a slide and transitioning. It takes a firm hand with the car, but more than that trust in Sceriffo’s training, in the training that he received, Team Orange and its home base in Ebisu, years of competing in D1GP and years more in the mountains before that.
Pennzoil put this together, connecting me with Sceriffo and covering the cost of the school. I get my diploma, and a handshake, and a smile, and a picture, but I’m left with something. An itch. I want to go back. Sceriffo laughs, and tells me that it’s wrong for me to just do this school and then not continue. Another lesson and I’d be doing tandems. Already, he says, I’m good enough to enter a drift day and not look out of place with the rest of everyone there. “You must come back,” he says. “No later than May.”
It’s two full days that I spent there with my maestro, as Sceriffo tells me to call him, and then it is over. I file back into my rental Dodge Charger and start the long drive back from Atlanta Motorsports Park to the airport. The rain is still pouring down, the highway just a procession of red taillights in the haze. I pull off to get gas, and spot a deserted parking garage, its rooftop empty and greasy. I have no handbrake to work with, no clutch either, but I remember my lessons. Turn in, lift off, brake on and catch the slide, power back, look ahead, and cut the car back. If it works here, even in this, these lessons should work with anything.
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