I've never felt violated by a motor sport before- but no other form of driving has left me as embarrassed, abused and dirty as drifting. Open only to rear-drive cars, it requires lapping a track or skid-pad in a gracefully out-of-control fashion- with the tires smoking, car pitched sideways, and the rear-end hanging out. If cars could moon people, this is what it would look like.


Such tail-sliding can chew through back tires in a hurry while whipping drivers around relentlessly and leaving them to clean melted rubber dust out of themselves for days. It looks like madness and is far from the most logical way to get around a track- but when executed properly, drifting is extremely rewarding and very cool to watch. As evidenced by increasing popularity across numerous venues and media North America, it's catching on in a big way.

Rafael Pimental, a drifting instructor, comments on the current drifting craze. "Drifting has been around since drivers started to push their cars hard around corners. It's a part of other forms of motorsport like rally or ice racing, and it is popular because it's fun. There are a lot of factors that come into play that keep it unpredictable and interesting".

I recently headed to an ONI JDM Drift School course at Shannonville Motorsports Park to see what possessed drifting fanatics like Pimental to spend their free time melting tires, and to try and learn a few of their techniques. Our classroom was a freshly paved skid-pad: a large, flat asphalt surface free of obstacles or distractions.

I needed a vehicle for the course, and something nimble, gutsy and rear wheel drive would be in order. The track-ready Mazda MX-5 quickly popped into mind with its perfect weight distribution, close-ratio, 6-speed manual gearbox and 170 horsepower engine.

Lessons devised by the instructors involved various attempts at breaking traction into a skid, and then maintaining the skid with careful throttle application. From making donuts around a single pylon to carrying a long, graceful slide, the principle was the same.

Thing is, vehicles would all react differently to the exercises. The MX-5 is set up for masses of grip- so breaking traction simultaneously required a good, swift yank on the parking brake and sharp steering input. Even popping the clutch from high revs while steering in wouldn't break traction sufficiently. The instructors helped identify the best technique to get the MX-5 sideways early on in the day, and left me with instructions on how to remember it: 'approach...de-clutch ...yank...steer... clutch... throttle ... throttle....'.

That's a lot to pull off at once- and after two dozen tries resulting in a spin-out, I quickly realized that drifting was considerably more challenging than YouTube videos make it look. The MX-5 looks the part of a drift-animal on paper- though its short wheelbase, light weight and super-glue handling make it a real chore to control things when the tires finally break their adhesion.