A Brief History of Drifting
Posted By seovine on September 3, 2010
The precise history of drifting is still a topic that generates much debate among racing fans even today. While the identity of the first ever drifter is lost in the annals of automotive history, it is commonly accepted that Japanese driver Kunimitsu Takahashi was the first to use drifting manoeuvres during races in the late ’70s.
Many will be surprised to learn that the ‘father of drifting’ had his start as a motorcycle racer; Kunimitsu Takahashi gained early fame as the first Japanese rider to win the Road Racing World Championship Grand Prix riding a 250cc Honda. His motorcycling career came to an abrupt end after a major racing accident in 1962, after which he switched to racing in cars. During his burgeoning racing career Takahashi began using various drifting techniques as a method of handling bends while maintaining speed. Takahashi’s drifting tactics won him legions of adoring fans, who were drawn to the spectacle of a car screeching through a tight corner at high speed with smoking tyres. Not only was it theatrical and crowd-pleasing, Takahashi also found that drifting also won him quite a few races.
Takahashi’s drifting style caught the eye of Keiichi Tsuchiya, a brash young street racer and rising star of Japan’s Formula 3 scene. Not content to merely copy Takahashi’s techniques on the race track, Tsuchiya wanted to take drifting to the next level by making it a motor-sport in its own right. Tsuchiya began to hone his craft on the windy roads of Japanese mountain passes. The constant barrage of twists, turns and bends on such roads provided the perfect opportunity for continuous drifting. Tsuchiya attempts to take an obscure racing technique and change it into an art-form on those winding Japanese mountain roads have become the stuff of legends. The Japanese word for mountain pass, Touge, has become part of the vocabulary of the drift racing scene around the world.
Tsuchiya soon found backing from Japan’s leading car tuning and racing magazines to produce a short video highlighting his drifting skills. This video, called Pluspy, became an instant hit among racing fans and muscle car aficionados, inspiring many amateurs to become drifters later on in their careers. A year after releasing Pluspy, Tsuchiya and his backers went on to organise the world’s first drifting tournament called the D1 Grand Prix. Held for the first time at the Ebisu Circuit in Fukushima, Japan, the D1 Grand Prix was a massive success and has grown into the leading drifting tournament in the world.
Since the first D1 tournament in 1988 drifting has made a huge impact in the world of automotive sports. Drifting pervades modern car culture at every level; drift-racing take place in D1 sanctioned tournaments at the world’s biggest race-tracks and also on impromptu races held illegally on public roads. Unlike Formula-1 or stock car racing the ease of entry into drift racing means that there is a thriving, yet highly illegal, underground drift racing scene where amateurs race each other in modified Japanese imports on the open road.
D1 Grand Prix Tournaments have gone beyond the borders of Japan and are now held in countries around the world. Past Championships have been held in the United States, UK, Malaysia and New Zealand – countries with a massive drift-racing following. The success of the sport has also lead to the growth of many local and regional drifting clubs and associations, outside of the D1 banner. These organisations have grown very influential over the years, often rivalling the D1 Grand Prix in terms of market share on their home turf. Some of the more powerful home-grown drifting organisations are the D1NZ and NZ Drift Series in New Zealand, Pro-Drift Mania in Canada, Formula-D in the US, Superdrift in Italy, and the British Drift Championship in the UK.
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