You have no idea how indepth tuning can get. You can tune for angle, grip, stability, or just plain speed.. I do this, its not as easy as it looks. Drifting requires grip, and Drag tunes dont work worth a damn, and extremely short transmissions dont either as all your doing is slowing the car down. I use to use rabbit gears for tight tracks as it allowed full throttle for extended periods of time.
Disappointing.
Drag Tunes tend to maximize Front-to-rear weight transfer off of the line so the rear tires get maximized grip under forward acceleration, and have transmission ratios selected to maximize smooth, even acceleration between 0-150mph or so, speeds that drift cars do not exceed during cornering. Just because a car has maximized its acceleration, does not mean that it has poor handling. A properly tuned car can accelerate a quarter mile within a tenth of a second of its max potential without having prohibitively detrimental understeer. As long as the tires are not under considerable Toe-in, they can drift just fine and accelerate out of corners exceedingly well.
You need weight transfer to drift properly, and to pull off almost any form of complex drifting. Weight transfer is not always lateral, but also longitudinal, and many novice drifters make the mistake of ignoring the front-rear weight transfer while driving. Drag tunes usually have a raised rear end without extremely tight suspensions, so during cornering and braking the rear wheels tend to lose traction very quickly under this weight transfer (both longitudinal and lateral). The transmissions are tuned so that they have the closest amount of grip they can get at full throttle, which allows a car to be relatively stable under extreme input during or on exit of a corner.
It is not a coincidence that almost all of these qualities are also beneficial to drift tuning. It *is* a case by case scenario, and a full-tuned drag car will not drift perfectly, just as a full-tuned drift car will not drag race at its peak performance, but it is
very possible, likely, and relatively easy to tune the car to do both jobs relatively easily, especially if it is tuned to drag race on lower G-rating tires.
The only feature of a drag tune that would make a car prohibitively poor to drift is an extreme toe-in on the front or rear wheels that might cancel out any oversteer. However, a minor amount in some cars is perfectly acceptable and even easier to control, and even with extreme toe, an experienced drifter can still drift (albeit not very well) without needing inherent oversteer.
The simple fact of the matter is that for a car to function properly in
any circumstance, drag, drift, or track racing, the tuning must be balanced enough that it is capable of being controlled relatively easily to produce maximum, consistent results. Drifting is so much about car control that whether or not you are a capable driver determines more of how well a car can drift, than its tune. If you can't drift a decent drag car, then you must learn to drift better. Slap some CH tires on a drag tuned 1970 Challenger R/T and if you can't drift it, then you need to improve. My current Challenger tune drifts beautifully on CH, with max power and minimum weight and a drag-tuned transmission.
Are drag tunes
better than drift tunes, for drifting? No. Are they viable to use in a drift car? Of course. Can a car be okay at drag racing and drifting? Easily.
Don't be closed minded.
