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- The__Ghost__Z
In my last thread I mentioned the most basic and easy drift techniques as a break from the usual technical and advanced discussion. Now I'm going to bring it up another level, and talk about some of the more complex and difficult drift techniques, and when they should be used. Some of these techniques are only useful for certain corners or types of corners. Some are beautiful and difficult but serve no purpose, other than to complicate your driving, over some more basic techniques. The best of these advanced weapons are the ones that allow you to drift without any of the previous drifts. There is a noticeable gap in types of drifts here that I won't list, since GT5 is somewhat limited in all of the techniques you do, but I highly encourage anyone to attempt new and unique ways to drift and reap the benefits or drawbacks of each method. Simply using the E-brake or throwing the car around time and time again for every corner is not as skillful, nor as effective, as some of the more advanced techniques I will discuss here.
I will explain an off-course drift, brake and brake-lock drift, contact drift, and jump drift. Afterwards, I'll elaborate on how to combine some of these techniques with the more basic techniques on corner entry. Eventually, in later installments, I'll discuss corner exit strategies, how power, grip, weight, torque, transmission, and other factors affect the "drifting character" of a car and how to tune them for the fastest drift car possible, as well as how a suspension will affect the types of drift you have.
Off-Course Drift
Rather than causing external forces to overwhelm the rear tires and cause them to lose grip, it would be much easier if a driver could affect the road beneath him to give him a patch of low-grip area just enough to start a drift. Thankfully, there is a way.
Going off of the course is very difficult to correct without losing some speed. This drift is all about using precise timing and finesse to optimize your speed and lose little to none upon drift initiation by using a lower-grip contact patch beneath the rear tires at the edge of the track. In some cases, the edge of the track has a sudden and sharp change in height and will cause an instant loss of grip as a shock drift. Other times, the track goes into sand, or dirt, or simply a bumpy or low-grip area of still dry track. Each type of surface creates a different drift.
- Dirt: A prime example is the final corner of Tsukuba Circuit. The track has minimal edge before dropping into dirt. These track types cause a small loss in speed, but also have extremely limited turning performance if a front wheel gets caught as well. It is imperative that turn-in and timing must be perfect so that the front wheel does not end up on the dirt before the rear.
- Sand The last corner (and a few others) of Suzuka East Circuit. The difficulty with sand, compared to dirt, is that it has even less grip and reduces speed faster. It functions much like dirt, but is prone to slowing entry speed down significantly if not taken with even more skill. The ideal is to then enter faster, but it becomes a rising scale of difficulty and risk. If a front wheel hits the sand, the car will understeer terribly, obviously, and the risk is always greater than with dirt.
- Low-grip track Fuji Speedway, in many corners. When a low grip "edge" of the track exists at the entry, then the drift can be initiated just like a dirt track, except you can apply more power, and suffer less shock to the direction of the car. The trade-off is, however, that it is more likely that the rear will not lose traction, resulting in a car that steers too far off-course. Higher powered cars have an advantage in attempting this type of drift.
Now that I've explained how each type of track affects the off-course drift, I can explain just exactly what it is. The drift has a few difficulties that present itself: How do you have the rear wheels go off course if the front wheels will hit the dirt first? How do you enter at a speed over grip speeds when you have even less grip, and drifting is slower around corners than a grip run? And, of course, why would you ever do something so risky?
The answers are simple. You make the rear wheels go off course without the front wheels leaving the track, you take advantage of the wider corner you can take, and you do the risk because it is both fast and stylish, and its difficulty will put you apart from other drifters.
Using the last corner at Tsukuba as an example, the corner entry is similar to that of a simple lift-off or turn-in style drift, where natural oversteer will allow a power-over to maintain the drift. But the difference is that immediately after a straight-line braking zone has finished, entering at speeds that, if gripping, would cause you to not enter the corner and wreck, you ride the edge of the track until you get to the turn. With a subtle application of the steering away and then towards the edge, followed immediately by turning into the corner, you let off of the brakes just long enough (as maintaining the brakes through this maneuver causes enough understeer to force the front tires to hit dirt as well) that the rear of the car swings the necessary half-foot to get the outside rear tires to touch the dirt. You then turn hard into the corner as the inside-rear tires's speed overtakes that of the outside rear tires speed, causing a sudden increase in angle as the outside rear wants to pull the car in a straight line into the dirt, and the inside wants to follow the track. Since the car cannot split in half, the inside rear tire (already with very very little weight on it) loses traction During this, trail braking can be applied to slow the car down to drift speeds for the corner very quickly. Counter steer is crucial so that the front wheels can keep the rear from fully entering the dirt and going off-track. Once the whole car is back on track and a drift is being done as normal, you can exit the corner as you would any other drift.
That initial "wobble" to bring the outside rear tire onto the dirt is what will determine a good driver from a bad one. It requires smoothness yet force. Once a driver can execute the drift easily and repeatedly, optimizing this drift is the same as minimizing how much force is required to make the tire enter the dirt. A good driver will have very little weight transfer and only about a foot of movement. The faster and more precisely this is done, the more time can be spent braking and the faster the entry speed. The slower it is done, the more likely the car will go off-track. Having too slow of reaction time will cause you to fail at this drift over and over.
Advantages: Entry speed. It's fast. Its so fast that in a car with sufficiently tight suspension and proper braking technique up until the corner, it requires no throttle to initiate drifting 5mph over grip limit speeds. It achieves this by having naturally good cornering technique: You can take a slightly wider line since you are using some of the track beyond the corner. You can brake later since some of your speed will be depleted by the additional friction on the tire in the dirt. It has relatively low weight transfer in order to drift, compared to more novice techniques. Lastly, because it requires minimal weight transfer, suspension can be tuned very tight and low, increasing cornering speed further. All of these explain why a properly executed off-course drift is so fast.
Disadvantages: This type of drift is absurdly risky and must be practiced repeatedly by a good driver who can already drift using the techniques in my previous thread. It is specific to certain corners and is different every time (unlike an E-brake drift, which is so easy it can be done on any corner to moderate effect) it also requires incredible braking ability, as you must time the entry speed, when to let off the brakes to allow the rear to slip off track without the front as well, and when to return to the brakes to trail brake the corner.
Requirements: Only skill and an appropriate corner. No special tuning needs to be done to pull this off, as long as the car in stock form can produce a drift.
Braking Drift
Once a driver has graduated beyond the E-brake drift, they can do the braking drift, which takes advantage of the longitudinal weight transfer under braking to allow the rear wheels to lose traction when steering is put in. It is, like the off-course drift, very simple in concept but very complex in application. However, almost any drift car and execute it as well.
Under braking, load transfer places less grip on the rear tires, but also divides the front tires' grip between braking and turning, resulting in understeer. This type of drift allows a slight lift-off of the brakes so that for a fraction of a second, the front end still maintains the load transfer without the braking force causing understeer. A sharp-turn in during this period will cause the rear to slide, as it has almost no weight pushing it down. Being a type of weight-transfer drift, this requires sufficiently loose suspension. It is very fast going down-hill, where front-bias weight transfer is even more present. It is also effective for narrow roads where side-to-side weight transfer is more difficult.
Advantages: Relatively quick and can be done on almost any corner effectively, with no need for side-to-side weight transfer. This keeps the inside tires having good levels of grip. Can be combined with other weight-transfer drifts without changing settings. Very good for stock-suspension cars. No requirements on power to initiate the drift.
Disadvantages: Requires good braking technique, and if done wrong, is extremely slow. Requires loose suspension and even looser damper settings. If a car brakes hard and a driver cannot threshhold brake, it is difficult to control, and a brake-lock drift is preferable.
Requirements: Loose suspension, front-bias longitudinal weight transfer, sufficient brake balance settings so the car does not skid tires upon braking or understeer heavily.
The Brake-Lock Drift
I will admit, I have a personal connection to this drift. It was one of the first techniques, a long time ago, that I discovered and inspired me to try new and different approaches to drifting, graduating from an e-brake drifter to something better. Since then I've spent lots of time developing it and it is both my favorite and most commonly used type of drift.
This drift is all about ABS, or lack thereof. It should be noted that under braking, a tire's braking ability to slow the car down is directly related to the lift forces on the tires as well as their grip levels. That is, when tuning brake balance, you should tune the ratio of balance in relation to what forces the earth exerts upon the tires to slow the car down, rather than the static or braking weight distribution. Next, you should take into account that rear brakes are smaller than front, and if the rear tires have more traction from the size of the contact patch in relation to the front. Once this careful ratio of front brake balance and rear brake balance is achieve, it can be scaled from 1-10 on the GT5 tuning settings depending on how sensitive a driver prefers their brakes to be.
Further adjustment of stiffening the front brakes will allow a Brake-Lock drift. This drift is much like a braking drift, except that immediately before turn-in, a driver very quickly over-uses the brakes, causing the front wheels to lose traction. While this would normally prompt understeer as the steering tires lose grip, because the rear wheels did not lose traction they will begin to overtake the front. With slight power application, this allows the car to enter a drift. It maintains all other physics of the braking drift, but you can have an even higher entry speed and greater angle from the greater braking forces and earlier drift initiation compared to the braking drift, and because it is less dependent upon front-bias weight transfer, can be done in cars with a more centralized weight and/or stiffer suspension.
There is another way to do this however, and that involves tuning the brake balance such that the rear wheels lose traction before the front wheels. This can produce even higher angle drifts as the front never has the chance to understeer the car. It is less fast upon entry, but much more controllable. The primary difficulty with this variation however, is that straight-line braking becomes much more UNcontrollable.
Advantages: Fast entry speed, fast braking capabilities, avoid spinning out since the front tires initially understeer. Can often follow a perfect line without compensation for drifting. Can be done on almost any corner.
Disadvantages: Requires extensive brake balance tuning to optimize and excellent braking technique. Corners which do not require braking cannot be taken at speed using this drift.
Requirements: Sufficiently loose suspension (but more tight than is necessary for a braking drift) and very well tuned brake balance.
Contact Drift
This is a rather nasty type of drift that is both stupid, audacious, and potentially hazardous. Thankfully, GT5 is not real life, but a simulator. And what would be the point of a simulator if you couldn't try things too dangerous to do in real life? This drift is exactly as it sounds. It involves contacting your car with some rigid or moving object to initiate or transfer a drift.
An example here is the chicane near the end of Special Stage Route 5. Upon entering from the uphill straight, an E-brake drift, brake-lock drift, lift-off, or power-over drift can be used (since most weight transfer drifts become less effective as the track becomes less level) but instead of reducing speed to appropriate corner levels, the driver comes in to fast and deliberately takes a wider line while drifting. This causes the rear of his car to make contact with the guard rail. The difficulty in the drift's initiation is that you have to be able to predict exactly what the force of impact will do to the trajectory of your car.
Upon making contact with the rail, the car's rear instantly loses traction as lateral G forces far exceed what the tires can do in impulse, and because of its sudden instantaneous change in lateral force, no amount of suspension tuning can compensate for the high impulse of the contact, as in, you can't "slow" the transfer down much at all. The impact will send the rear out and change direction of the car as well as slowing it all in one action. How fast this happens does depend on the polar moment of inertia and the overall load transfer and weight distribution characteristics of the car. A front-bias car will have a more dramatic change in direction, a less front-bias or rear-bias car will have less of a directional change and may not be able to sufficiently pull off the maneuver. Higher polar moment of inertia allows the directional change to happen quicker. Front/Rear weight distribution affects where the pivot axis of the direction change is. Counter steering affects the nose's position relative to the rear's position.
Immediately after contact, the car will be facing away from the next corner. The idea is to use power to push the car away from the next corner for a fraction of second, before using a classic transition to face the corner and drive through it regularly, using a very high speed corner exit strategy.
On paper, it says all of the wrong things: Losing control of the car from impact, entering the first corner too fast, not taking the best line possible. However, this maneuver is faster if done correctly than driving normally. The first corner's line is very wide and fast, and up until the point of contact, is going very fast relative to a normal grip line. The contact and slight spin are slow and lose time relative to a normal grip line, but once the spin stops and the tires have traction again, the car is left in a better position to power out of the corner earlier and with more speed. For the following straight, it will have more speed throughout.
The difficulty with proper racing lines is that the more corners are interconnected, the less time there is to change lanes or approach the next corner effectively. This is made up for by choosing a different apex approach to maximize your speed loss, but is relatively slow. This type of drift is fast because it chooses wider lines and better apexes (in the case of the contact turn, the car's position is as if the apex was inside the guard rail before and after the contact) for more corners by sacrificing speed on some corners. The longer the straight afterwards, the more speed you carry.
A variation of this is using other cars as contact points. This means approaching a corner too fast from the outside, and contacting an inside car's front and using it to turn your car. This is not as fast as normal contact drift, but can be done when other cars are on the road and a contact drift cannot be initiated. While on the outside it is gross and horrible driving, and in real life one of the worst things a person can do, (and likely to get you kicked from rooms) this is again, a simulator, and if a person wants to pursuit of speed and drifting techniques to their fullest, it's worth the experimentation. Experimentation no matter how dangerous, and in good fun, is part of the soul of drifting. If we did not push the limits of driving, then would drifting have ever been invented? Or most of motorsports? The contact drift is, while disgustingly selfish and dangerous, possibly the most thrilling, difficult, stylish, and by those definitions, pure type of drift that exists. It is doing something cool and effective in the pursuit of fun and the thrill of speed. In practice especially, it can be particularly fun to attempt. Eventually, a drift team might decide to push the limits and do tandem contact drifts, but it will first require them giving up their pride in their technique, as well as their outdated misconceptions about "competitive drifting" and get back to the pure roots of the motorsport. The GT5 community has not matured to this point, nor will it every really reach it I believe.
Advantages: Somewhat fast through specific corners, very satisfying and beautiful if done correctly.
Disadvantages: Obviously, it damages the car and is rather difficult to pull off. It isn't as fast as a well-executed braking drift, although the gap in speed closes as the corners become sharper and the straights between shorter relative to the straights before and after.
Requirements: Only a specific type of chicane, and skill. This can be done on Cote D'azur, Special Stage Route 5, Fuji Speedway (with chicane) and some others. Settings only affect how the car drifts, not whether or not it can succeed.
The Jump Drift
In the spirit of pushing the limits of drift, here is the Ken-Block-Holy-Grail of drifting. The jump drift is simple. Upon leaving the ground after a sharp incline and sharp downhill section, a car's front weight is incredibly high (depending on the impact, possibly higher than the weight of the car itself due to added gravitational forces) and its rear weight is very low. There is a brief section where the front wheels can input steering without any rear wheels touching the ground, and the rear wheels have almost no weight once they do (the only force keeping them on the ground after the shock of impact has wore off being the suspension springs and unsprung weight) So if there is a very slight turning input before or during this section of the land, the car will begin drifting. The difficulty in this drift is dealing with the rebound forces (both driver skill and damper settings affect this, as they should be set to minimize weight transfer to the rear) once the car impacts with the ground. There are tens, maybe hundreds, of different forces that affect the contact points with the ground and the car and how it will behave once the jump ends. Jump drifting is all about maintaining control over all of these forces and having a wonderfully balanced drift.
The main forces to consider are the front weight and rear weight forces, the lift forces on the ground counteracting what the suspension cannot hold, the lateral forces introducing the slip and the friction that slows the car from jumping speeds to drifting speeds.
Unfortunately, there is little specification on this drift as it is so dependent on settings, cars, and track layout (height, speed, angle, etc.) that it cannot be generalized beyond this. However, I still encourage you to practice a jump drift, rally-style, and optimize the speed further on your own.
Advantages: Absolutely beautiful, incredibly fast and allows minimal braking before the hill, as safer drivers will slow down much more before the hill.
Disadvantages: Very risky, prone to crashing, requires fine suspension tuning and very very very hard to control.
Requirements: Sufficiently tight suspension so that the car does not become unpredictable upon impact as parts of the road contact with the body, and very high level of control. Optimizing this drift is about making it more slow and predictable.
My next section, if I don't change my mind, will elaborate on corner exit strategies from a drift. It will be, thankfully, shorter than this post, as there are quite a few less options one has to exit a drift than one has to enter it. I'll explain the fastest, and the most easily controlled, types of corner exits and how a suspension should be tuned for it. I encourage any readers who have followed thus far to experiment with the techniques in this thread, and maybe even invent your own on GT5. I would also encourage any readers to read these threads with appropriate knowledge and not get in over your head. You have to have a certain mindset to realize the benefit of some of these maneuvers, and a typical GT5 Handbrake drifter will not see either the purpose, or the necessity, of this type of analysis. I hope that with time they can be used not as reference material or controversial analysis, but give people an appreciation for different, creative, and effective drifting, and prompt people to push their own limits as drivers to be more precise and efficient in those drifts.
And as a closing note, given what I know about 90% of the drifters here, if it looks like this thread is blatantly incorrect, unethical, or silly, then you should first spend more time to develop these techniques and use a more fun and skill-oriented perception toward them. If you feel that the above description is the case with this thread, then it is very likely you have misinterpreted part of this thread, and any criticism should allow for that possibility. That being said, I created this special account and this series of threads for a reason, and I mean absolutely no harm or harshness toward any readers and only want to improve the drifting experience on this game. I have no need to any time with this account beyond improving my own technique and sharing it with others, and it is not what I intended it for.
I will explain an off-course drift, brake and brake-lock drift, contact drift, and jump drift. Afterwards, I'll elaborate on how to combine some of these techniques with the more basic techniques on corner entry. Eventually, in later installments, I'll discuss corner exit strategies, how power, grip, weight, torque, transmission, and other factors affect the "drifting character" of a car and how to tune them for the fastest drift car possible, as well as how a suspension will affect the types of drift you have.
Off-Course Drift
Rather than causing external forces to overwhelm the rear tires and cause them to lose grip, it would be much easier if a driver could affect the road beneath him to give him a patch of low-grip area just enough to start a drift. Thankfully, there is a way.
Going off of the course is very difficult to correct without losing some speed. This drift is all about using precise timing and finesse to optimize your speed and lose little to none upon drift initiation by using a lower-grip contact patch beneath the rear tires at the edge of the track. In some cases, the edge of the track has a sudden and sharp change in height and will cause an instant loss of grip as a shock drift. Other times, the track goes into sand, or dirt, or simply a bumpy or low-grip area of still dry track. Each type of surface creates a different drift.
- Dirt: A prime example is the final corner of Tsukuba Circuit. The track has minimal edge before dropping into dirt. These track types cause a small loss in speed, but also have extremely limited turning performance if a front wheel gets caught as well. It is imperative that turn-in and timing must be perfect so that the front wheel does not end up on the dirt before the rear.
- Sand The last corner (and a few others) of Suzuka East Circuit. The difficulty with sand, compared to dirt, is that it has even less grip and reduces speed faster. It functions much like dirt, but is prone to slowing entry speed down significantly if not taken with even more skill. The ideal is to then enter faster, but it becomes a rising scale of difficulty and risk. If a front wheel hits the sand, the car will understeer terribly, obviously, and the risk is always greater than with dirt.
- Low-grip track Fuji Speedway, in many corners. When a low grip "edge" of the track exists at the entry, then the drift can be initiated just like a dirt track, except you can apply more power, and suffer less shock to the direction of the car. The trade-off is, however, that it is more likely that the rear will not lose traction, resulting in a car that steers too far off-course. Higher powered cars have an advantage in attempting this type of drift.
Now that I've explained how each type of track affects the off-course drift, I can explain just exactly what it is. The drift has a few difficulties that present itself: How do you have the rear wheels go off course if the front wheels will hit the dirt first? How do you enter at a speed over grip speeds when you have even less grip, and drifting is slower around corners than a grip run? And, of course, why would you ever do something so risky?
The answers are simple. You make the rear wheels go off course without the front wheels leaving the track, you take advantage of the wider corner you can take, and you do the risk because it is both fast and stylish, and its difficulty will put you apart from other drifters.
Using the last corner at Tsukuba as an example, the corner entry is similar to that of a simple lift-off or turn-in style drift, where natural oversteer will allow a power-over to maintain the drift. But the difference is that immediately after a straight-line braking zone has finished, entering at speeds that, if gripping, would cause you to not enter the corner and wreck, you ride the edge of the track until you get to the turn. With a subtle application of the steering away and then towards the edge, followed immediately by turning into the corner, you let off of the brakes just long enough (as maintaining the brakes through this maneuver causes enough understeer to force the front tires to hit dirt as well) that the rear of the car swings the necessary half-foot to get the outside rear tires to touch the dirt. You then turn hard into the corner as the inside-rear tires's speed overtakes that of the outside rear tires speed, causing a sudden increase in angle as the outside rear wants to pull the car in a straight line into the dirt, and the inside wants to follow the track. Since the car cannot split in half, the inside rear tire (already with very very little weight on it) loses traction During this, trail braking can be applied to slow the car down to drift speeds for the corner very quickly. Counter steer is crucial so that the front wheels can keep the rear from fully entering the dirt and going off-track. Once the whole car is back on track and a drift is being done as normal, you can exit the corner as you would any other drift.
That initial "wobble" to bring the outside rear tire onto the dirt is what will determine a good driver from a bad one. It requires smoothness yet force. Once a driver can execute the drift easily and repeatedly, optimizing this drift is the same as minimizing how much force is required to make the tire enter the dirt. A good driver will have very little weight transfer and only about a foot of movement. The faster and more precisely this is done, the more time can be spent braking and the faster the entry speed. The slower it is done, the more likely the car will go off-track. Having too slow of reaction time will cause you to fail at this drift over and over.
Advantages: Entry speed. It's fast. Its so fast that in a car with sufficiently tight suspension and proper braking technique up until the corner, it requires no throttle to initiate drifting 5mph over grip limit speeds. It achieves this by having naturally good cornering technique: You can take a slightly wider line since you are using some of the track beyond the corner. You can brake later since some of your speed will be depleted by the additional friction on the tire in the dirt. It has relatively low weight transfer in order to drift, compared to more novice techniques. Lastly, because it requires minimal weight transfer, suspension can be tuned very tight and low, increasing cornering speed further. All of these explain why a properly executed off-course drift is so fast.
Disadvantages: This type of drift is absurdly risky and must be practiced repeatedly by a good driver who can already drift using the techniques in my previous thread. It is specific to certain corners and is different every time (unlike an E-brake drift, which is so easy it can be done on any corner to moderate effect) it also requires incredible braking ability, as you must time the entry speed, when to let off the brakes to allow the rear to slip off track without the front as well, and when to return to the brakes to trail brake the corner.
Requirements: Only skill and an appropriate corner. No special tuning needs to be done to pull this off, as long as the car in stock form can produce a drift.
Braking Drift
Once a driver has graduated beyond the E-brake drift, they can do the braking drift, which takes advantage of the longitudinal weight transfer under braking to allow the rear wheels to lose traction when steering is put in. It is, like the off-course drift, very simple in concept but very complex in application. However, almost any drift car and execute it as well.
Under braking, load transfer places less grip on the rear tires, but also divides the front tires' grip between braking and turning, resulting in understeer. This type of drift allows a slight lift-off of the brakes so that for a fraction of a second, the front end still maintains the load transfer without the braking force causing understeer. A sharp-turn in during this period will cause the rear to slide, as it has almost no weight pushing it down. Being a type of weight-transfer drift, this requires sufficiently loose suspension. It is very fast going down-hill, where front-bias weight transfer is even more present. It is also effective for narrow roads where side-to-side weight transfer is more difficult.
Advantages: Relatively quick and can be done on almost any corner effectively, with no need for side-to-side weight transfer. This keeps the inside tires having good levels of grip. Can be combined with other weight-transfer drifts without changing settings. Very good for stock-suspension cars. No requirements on power to initiate the drift.
Disadvantages: Requires good braking technique, and if done wrong, is extremely slow. Requires loose suspension and even looser damper settings. If a car brakes hard and a driver cannot threshhold brake, it is difficult to control, and a brake-lock drift is preferable.
Requirements: Loose suspension, front-bias longitudinal weight transfer, sufficient brake balance settings so the car does not skid tires upon braking or understeer heavily.
The Brake-Lock Drift
I will admit, I have a personal connection to this drift. It was one of the first techniques, a long time ago, that I discovered and inspired me to try new and different approaches to drifting, graduating from an e-brake drifter to something better. Since then I've spent lots of time developing it and it is both my favorite and most commonly used type of drift.
This drift is all about ABS, or lack thereof. It should be noted that under braking, a tire's braking ability to slow the car down is directly related to the lift forces on the tires as well as their grip levels. That is, when tuning brake balance, you should tune the ratio of balance in relation to what forces the earth exerts upon the tires to slow the car down, rather than the static or braking weight distribution. Next, you should take into account that rear brakes are smaller than front, and if the rear tires have more traction from the size of the contact patch in relation to the front. Once this careful ratio of front brake balance and rear brake balance is achieve, it can be scaled from 1-10 on the GT5 tuning settings depending on how sensitive a driver prefers their brakes to be.
Further adjustment of stiffening the front brakes will allow a Brake-Lock drift. This drift is much like a braking drift, except that immediately before turn-in, a driver very quickly over-uses the brakes, causing the front wheels to lose traction. While this would normally prompt understeer as the steering tires lose grip, because the rear wheels did not lose traction they will begin to overtake the front. With slight power application, this allows the car to enter a drift. It maintains all other physics of the braking drift, but you can have an even higher entry speed and greater angle from the greater braking forces and earlier drift initiation compared to the braking drift, and because it is less dependent upon front-bias weight transfer, can be done in cars with a more centralized weight and/or stiffer suspension.
There is another way to do this however, and that involves tuning the brake balance such that the rear wheels lose traction before the front wheels. This can produce even higher angle drifts as the front never has the chance to understeer the car. It is less fast upon entry, but much more controllable. The primary difficulty with this variation however, is that straight-line braking becomes much more UNcontrollable.
Advantages: Fast entry speed, fast braking capabilities, avoid spinning out since the front tires initially understeer. Can often follow a perfect line without compensation for drifting. Can be done on almost any corner.
Disadvantages: Requires extensive brake balance tuning to optimize and excellent braking technique. Corners which do not require braking cannot be taken at speed using this drift.
Requirements: Sufficiently loose suspension (but more tight than is necessary for a braking drift) and very well tuned brake balance.
Contact Drift
This is a rather nasty type of drift that is both stupid, audacious, and potentially hazardous. Thankfully, GT5 is not real life, but a simulator. And what would be the point of a simulator if you couldn't try things too dangerous to do in real life? This drift is exactly as it sounds. It involves contacting your car with some rigid or moving object to initiate or transfer a drift.
An example here is the chicane near the end of Special Stage Route 5. Upon entering from the uphill straight, an E-brake drift, brake-lock drift, lift-off, or power-over drift can be used (since most weight transfer drifts become less effective as the track becomes less level) but instead of reducing speed to appropriate corner levels, the driver comes in to fast and deliberately takes a wider line while drifting. This causes the rear of his car to make contact with the guard rail. The difficulty in the drift's initiation is that you have to be able to predict exactly what the force of impact will do to the trajectory of your car.
Upon making contact with the rail, the car's rear instantly loses traction as lateral G forces far exceed what the tires can do in impulse, and because of its sudden instantaneous change in lateral force, no amount of suspension tuning can compensate for the high impulse of the contact, as in, you can't "slow" the transfer down much at all. The impact will send the rear out and change direction of the car as well as slowing it all in one action. How fast this happens does depend on the polar moment of inertia and the overall load transfer and weight distribution characteristics of the car. A front-bias car will have a more dramatic change in direction, a less front-bias or rear-bias car will have less of a directional change and may not be able to sufficiently pull off the maneuver. Higher polar moment of inertia allows the directional change to happen quicker. Front/Rear weight distribution affects where the pivot axis of the direction change is. Counter steering affects the nose's position relative to the rear's position.
Immediately after contact, the car will be facing away from the next corner. The idea is to use power to push the car away from the next corner for a fraction of second, before using a classic transition to face the corner and drive through it regularly, using a very high speed corner exit strategy.
On paper, it says all of the wrong things: Losing control of the car from impact, entering the first corner too fast, not taking the best line possible. However, this maneuver is faster if done correctly than driving normally. The first corner's line is very wide and fast, and up until the point of contact, is going very fast relative to a normal grip line. The contact and slight spin are slow and lose time relative to a normal grip line, but once the spin stops and the tires have traction again, the car is left in a better position to power out of the corner earlier and with more speed. For the following straight, it will have more speed throughout.
The difficulty with proper racing lines is that the more corners are interconnected, the less time there is to change lanes or approach the next corner effectively. This is made up for by choosing a different apex approach to maximize your speed loss, but is relatively slow. This type of drift is fast because it chooses wider lines and better apexes (in the case of the contact turn, the car's position is as if the apex was inside the guard rail before and after the contact) for more corners by sacrificing speed on some corners. The longer the straight afterwards, the more speed you carry.
A variation of this is using other cars as contact points. This means approaching a corner too fast from the outside, and contacting an inside car's front and using it to turn your car. This is not as fast as normal contact drift, but can be done when other cars are on the road and a contact drift cannot be initiated. While on the outside it is gross and horrible driving, and in real life one of the worst things a person can do, (and likely to get you kicked from rooms) this is again, a simulator, and if a person wants to pursuit of speed and drifting techniques to their fullest, it's worth the experimentation. Experimentation no matter how dangerous, and in good fun, is part of the soul of drifting. If we did not push the limits of driving, then would drifting have ever been invented? Or most of motorsports? The contact drift is, while disgustingly selfish and dangerous, possibly the most thrilling, difficult, stylish, and by those definitions, pure type of drift that exists. It is doing something cool and effective in the pursuit of fun and the thrill of speed. In practice especially, it can be particularly fun to attempt. Eventually, a drift team might decide to push the limits and do tandem contact drifts, but it will first require them giving up their pride in their technique, as well as their outdated misconceptions about "competitive drifting" and get back to the pure roots of the motorsport. The GT5 community has not matured to this point, nor will it every really reach it I believe.
Advantages: Somewhat fast through specific corners, very satisfying and beautiful if done correctly.
Disadvantages: Obviously, it damages the car and is rather difficult to pull off. It isn't as fast as a well-executed braking drift, although the gap in speed closes as the corners become sharper and the straights between shorter relative to the straights before and after.
Requirements: Only a specific type of chicane, and skill. This can be done on Cote D'azur, Special Stage Route 5, Fuji Speedway (with chicane) and some others. Settings only affect how the car drifts, not whether or not it can succeed.
The Jump Drift
In the spirit of pushing the limits of drift, here is the Ken-Block-Holy-Grail of drifting. The jump drift is simple. Upon leaving the ground after a sharp incline and sharp downhill section, a car's front weight is incredibly high (depending on the impact, possibly higher than the weight of the car itself due to added gravitational forces) and its rear weight is very low. There is a brief section where the front wheels can input steering without any rear wheels touching the ground, and the rear wheels have almost no weight once they do (the only force keeping them on the ground after the shock of impact has wore off being the suspension springs and unsprung weight) So if there is a very slight turning input before or during this section of the land, the car will begin drifting. The difficulty in this drift is dealing with the rebound forces (both driver skill and damper settings affect this, as they should be set to minimize weight transfer to the rear) once the car impacts with the ground. There are tens, maybe hundreds, of different forces that affect the contact points with the ground and the car and how it will behave once the jump ends. Jump drifting is all about maintaining control over all of these forces and having a wonderfully balanced drift.
The main forces to consider are the front weight and rear weight forces, the lift forces on the ground counteracting what the suspension cannot hold, the lateral forces introducing the slip and the friction that slows the car from jumping speeds to drifting speeds.
Unfortunately, there is little specification on this drift as it is so dependent on settings, cars, and track layout (height, speed, angle, etc.) that it cannot be generalized beyond this. However, I still encourage you to practice a jump drift, rally-style, and optimize the speed further on your own.
Advantages: Absolutely beautiful, incredibly fast and allows minimal braking before the hill, as safer drivers will slow down much more before the hill.
Disadvantages: Very risky, prone to crashing, requires fine suspension tuning and very very very hard to control.
Requirements: Sufficiently tight suspension so that the car does not become unpredictable upon impact as parts of the road contact with the body, and very high level of control. Optimizing this drift is about making it more slow and predictable.
My next section, if I don't change my mind, will elaborate on corner exit strategies from a drift. It will be, thankfully, shorter than this post, as there are quite a few less options one has to exit a drift than one has to enter it. I'll explain the fastest, and the most easily controlled, types of corner exits and how a suspension should be tuned for it. I encourage any readers who have followed thus far to experiment with the techniques in this thread, and maybe even invent your own on GT5. I would also encourage any readers to read these threads with appropriate knowledge and not get in over your head. You have to have a certain mindset to realize the benefit of some of these maneuvers, and a typical GT5 Handbrake drifter will not see either the purpose, or the necessity, of this type of analysis. I hope that with time they can be used not as reference material or controversial analysis, but give people an appreciation for different, creative, and effective drifting, and prompt people to push their own limits as drivers to be more precise and efficient in those drifts.
And as a closing note, given what I know about 90% of the drifters here, if it looks like this thread is blatantly incorrect, unethical, or silly, then you should first spend more time to develop these techniques and use a more fun and skill-oriented perception toward them. If you feel that the above description is the case with this thread, then it is very likely you have misinterpreted part of this thread, and any criticism should allow for that possibility. That being said, I created this special account and this series of threads for a reason, and I mean absolutely no harm or harshness toward any readers and only want to improve the drifting experience on this game. I have no need to any time with this account beyond improving my own technique and sharing it with others, and it is not what I intended it for.
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