Smokin’! Julian Peterson lives to tell the tale after taking a spin – and a spinout – at a Formula Drift clinic

Clutch down – check. First gear engaged – check. Steer hard right and hold wheel – check. Revs up to 6,000 – check. Pop the clutch…and the car moves sideways. Fighting your instinct to take your foot off the accelerator, you hold the revs and the car starts to spin in a cloud of smoke. And of the thousands of thoughts running through your head, the predominant one is: hey, I’m not paying for the tyres – this is fun! 

Welcome to the Formula Drift clinic, where local members of the media got to play with other people’s pimped-out cars for the day, shifting, sliding, spinning at 100km an hour and generally doing things that would be frowned upon by the police. It’s all part of a taster for the Formula Drift competition at the end of the month (see here for details), featuring local drivers Colin Teo, Nick Lim and Ivan Lim, who will compete against top professionals like Japan’s Ryuji Miki and Daijiro Yoshihara, and Conrad Grunewald of the USA for the first time. It was Singapore’s best drift drivers who taught us the tricks of their trade, and Teo’s car I’m driving when I bust the air hose – oops. 

Drifting was invented relatively recently in Japan and made famous by The Fast and the Furious film trilogy. The sport embodies every boy’s dream of taking Mum or Dad’s car down to the deserted car park of the local shopping centre and giving it a very thorough workout. The cars are actually adapted from the kind Mum and Dad might own – Nissan, Toyota, Mazda, Ford – but with extra horsepower, no anti-lock brakes and modifications like roll cages, huge spoilers and lowered suspension. Amazingly, the cars we used for the clinic were still road-legal, so we drove them to the track at the Changi Exhibition Centre – although in Singapore, a number of certificates must be stowed in the glove box to prove the legality of the modifications. The essential point is that the car must be rear-wheel drive, the back tyres must spin and you must be able to ‘kick out the back end’, as they say – or get the rear wheels to slide out sideways in some more smoke. 


Training started with the ‘doughnut’ – spinning the car around and around, with the rear wheels revolving and smoking. I have seen this done a hundred times on World’s Wildest Police Videos (with plenty of the other doughnuts featured) but never tried it myself. It’s pretty easy when you know you don’t have to pay for the tyres; regular drift drivers can go through 12 tyres a day practising. But drifting gets a lot harder after the doughnut with the ‘e-brake drift’ – using the handbrake to slide the back of the car out and then throttling to keep the tyres spinning. It should result in a sweeping power slide, but for the novice, it looks more like a 180-degree spin and juddering stop. The figure-eight is tough, too – doughnut-ting but lifting off the throttle momentarily to change the direction of the car. 

Formula Drift is not like other motorsports, which are usually a simple race. Essentially, drifting is motorsport’s figure-skating to Formula One’s speedskating. Drift drivers – setting off in pairs around a set course – are judged on their line, speed, angle of car and overall impact (ie, showmanship). Points are deducted for crashing into someone or something, and the drivers have to maintain speed while looking good (the looking good can be difficult, as we learned). 

None of the drift drivers competing on 27 April are as famous as their Formula One counterparts – yet. Nick Lim’s day job, for example, is as a fishmonger. But while tickets for the first Singapore Grand Prix cost up to $7,500, there is only one price for a ticket to the first Formula Drift – $10 ($15 on the day). The main concern of Marcus Lim, general manager of organisers Binter, is that the event should be truly accessible to all – hence the price. And while drift driving could get a reputation as the rodeo of motorsports, I can attest that taming a drift car is harder than it looks. 

More details about Formula Drift Singapore.