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It
is estimated that drifting as we know it today goes back farther
than 20 years, starting its mainstream appearance in Japan. FYI,
Drift Session co-founder Tom Bryant was street drifting in Okinawa
in the early 1980’s, but even he attests that people were doing it
long before him.
Drifting
first started years ago in the winding mountain roads of Japan.
Illegal racers would race up and down the mountain passes (“touge,”
pronounced toe – gay) in the middle of the night with modified
street vehicles.
Since
they were racing as fast as they possibly could, occasionally a
racer would find himself pushing his vehicle past it’s traction
limits in a corner, causing the car to slip and skid. Some racers
would lose control of their vehicles and crash; others had the skill
to recover from skidding traction loss and eventually learned to
control the sliding motion.
Racers
quickly learned that being able to forcibly cause their vehicle to
slide across the roadway was a crowd-pleasing maneuver. Controlling
the “drift” soon became the ultimate expression of car-control
and a maneuver only used by highly skilled drivers.
Although
widely held beliefs, video games, and movies say otherwise, we can't
find any real evidence that drifting was a technique used for the
purpose of gaining or maintaining speed during races or time
battles. Except in the most extreme circumstance and cornering
angle, drifting is slower than traditional racing principles of
braking before and corner and then accelerating out. Therefore, we
assume that drifting was more of an exhibition maneuver rather than
an actual race technique.
As
more time passed, the street culture of Japan could see a clear-cut
difference between die-hard street racers and the “drifters.”
Street racers remained focused on fast times and winning races,
whereas the drifters had no set form of competition. The drifters
would slide their vehicles across the roadway in a freestyle manner;
attempting to link multiple turns together.
Being based on racing, speed is and always was important in
drifting, but is not the sole basis of judgment.
One
scholar has suggested that the Japanese government is in part to
blame for the prevalence of street racing and drifting. He states
that cities and towns in the countryside were given money by the
Japanese government to use in the development of their communities.
If they could not use all the money the government allocated, the
following year's annual budget would be reduced to reflect the
savings.
Not
wanting to have their budgets reduced, many rural areas turned to
the unnecessary construction of roadways that lead up and down the
sides of mountains. Since the object was simply to expend leftover
budget money, the mountain roads were a series of roads that wound
back upon each other tightly and would essentially lead to
nowhere.
The
development of these unnecessary roads provided the racetrack on
which street racers and drifters would refine their skills. Since
the roadway really didn't lead anywhere, they would remain unused by
the general public, but wide open for racing and drifting.
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