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R/C
Drift Meeting Obviously
our friends out of the Doriten
("Drift Tengoku") camp in Japan love drifting. They drift real
cars, take drifting photos, watch drifting videos, write drifting articles,
play drifting video games, hang out with other drifters, talk about drifting
all day, and they drift their remote controlled cars as well.
Since it’s difficult to get out to drift every night if you live in the city, lots of the Japan guys have their own R/C drift cars modeled after their real drift cars. While at the Tokyo Auto Salon, we got the chance run some R/C drift cars with Drift Samurai, Koguchi, Kawasaki, Yamanaka, and Bomba Yamamoto. Those guys are almost as fanatical about their R/C drifting as they are about real drifting. For those
of you that have never seen R/C drifting before, all you need is a 1/10
scale, 4-wheel-drive, electric remote controlled car (like a Tamiya,
HPI, or
Yokomo) and
some hard plastic tires (Yokomo sells "drift tires" now).
Basically a "hard plastic" drift tire is just 2 inch diameter
black ABS plastic pipe; the kind you can find at Home Depot. Cut the pipe
into a tire sized segment, slap those onto your R/C car wheels and you're
good to go. The low traction of the ABS pipe will allow your vehicle to slip
and slide across the pavement in very realistic drift simulation.
Doriten’s
Mr. Kawasaki brought his signature pink and white 4-door R/C drift car down
from Japan to check out some of Hawaii’s best. On Sunday January 22, 2006,
the Hawaii R/C Drift Meeting was held at Sandy Flemming’s Fast Elec-Tricks
in Pearl City. About 25 R/C cars were brought out along with numerous
spectators to show the Doriten editor what they could do.
All of the
Japan R/C drifters we ran into were running the Yokomo hard plastic tires,
while most of the guys in Hawaii are running black ABS plastic. I think the
ABS definitely allowed us a home course advantage here as the Hawaii cars
were able to accelerate very quickly, even on a course with elevation
changes. Another edge for the Hawaii drivers were those using 190mm chassis
with 200mm car bodies, giving their vehicles a wider stance, but more
importantly, allowing them to run much wider wheels and tires without
running into clearance issues. Much like running FRP over fenders on a real
drift car, the larger bodies allowed wider wheels and therefore additional
traction at high speeds. The R/C
course was set up using a special plastic track boundary. The course
consisted of 2 long sweepers, a chicane, and a tight series of switchback
corners. It was relatively high speed with a technical area on a slight down
slope that would prove difficult for many drivers that day.
Erik Alfires, the owner of Advance Graphics, setup 2 drift competitions that day. Full fields of 16 drivers per competition signed up and tsuiso (tandem) format was to be used. The judges Erik Alfires and Barry Lai selected drivers at random for pairing in Tsuiso battle. Each driver would get a chance to lead and follow around the course, the “offense” (or chasing driver) trying their best to gain positioning or pass the lead driver while the “defense” (lead driver) tried to run away from the chasing driver and hug the corner apexes to block the inside line.
It was a fierce battle, but in the end veteran R/C (and real car) drifter Jeron Sombrano walked away with back to back victories in the competitions, earning him a set of Yokomo wheels and tires. All in all, it was a great day for R/C drifting and we thank everyone that showed up. We hope to see you all again soon at the weekly Hawaii R/C drift meetings: Weekly
R/C Drift Meeting |
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