1 Gen Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX for drifting?

[Jesse Mortensen]

Anyone ever used a 1 Gen Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX for drifting? They are AWD and In mot sure if they work. I was planning on getting one cause they run the 4G63 turbo and I can get parts cheap. Let me know what you think.

[HX-50]

ok, the form answer to this is one of two things, some will tell you to sell it and buy a 240, but i say that if you think it would be a cool drift car you should do it, awd drift is great, i think you could have some fun with it, just get out there and have fun, also that's a great car to make into a rally car if you ever decide to get into it, it's like drifting, but in the dirt :-D

[Mr.Mecha]

Get ready to break stuff. The first gen DSM engines are pretty bullet proof but the drivetrain was just not designed to handle the stress of drifting. With all of drifting you will break stuff while doing it, just prepare to have a bit higher bill because of AWD. Hmmm... more on tires too...

[Jesse Mortensen]

RWD conversion

Has anyone ever converted these things to RWD? That might help with breaking stuff? I dont know a lot about this car yet, but I like the engine.

[Mr.Mecha]

Front biased AWD system, harder to convert, not worth it in my opinion. Subaru system is way easier to convert (still not easy).

http://www.drifting.com/forums/showt...&highlight=DSM

do a search, it's been discussed before.

[CrazyHawaiian]

Thats what people say about the 5 speed manual I'm swapping into my Camaro. But you gotta keep in mind that majority of the time someone's drivetrain breaks is because they are trying to get traction. Good example is hooking at the 1/4 mile drag strip. The sudden traction when the tires hook is what puts all that stress on the drivetrain. But in a sport like drifting, there is no large ammount of stress caused by sudden traction. Our sport involves a loss of traction. The tires give way, and the stress is not as great. I'm not saying drifting puts no stress on your drivetrain, but in my opinion its better than sports that involve high power and sudden traction like 1/4 mile drag racing. So you never know, your drivetrain might last longer than you think.

AWD drifting is great, but its also hard. I would look into disconnecting the front differential and convert that bad boy to RWD.

[Ripper]

Originally posted by CrazyHawaiian
AWD drifting is great, but its also hard. I would look into disconnecting the front differential and convert that bad boy to RWD.

is that even possible to just disconnecting the rear differential and covert it to RWD?also what about the DCCD?

[CrazyHawaiian]

I dont know if its possible, but I would look into it.

[mranlet]

Yeah it's possible.

I'm not too familiar with DSM AWD but I know that it's no harder than the Subaru's to convert.

AWD is hot sh!t as far as I'm concerned, and a 4G-powered car is a good platform - especially the 9(?) bolt - for it's dependability and capacity for high power.

I have an AWD drifting article that I wrote which may help you get started and will post it if anyone's interested.

-MR

[Jesse Mortensen]

Post it

Yeah post that article.

[mranlet]

OK, here it is, taken from the context of someone asking about how to drift his DSM:

Ahhh...

Welcome to the world of AWD drifting my friend. You have now completed step 1 - finding that every single AWD system in the world is completely different from any other system...

I drifted my AWD 91 Legacy Turbo for years, and it's no easy thing (IMO, harder than the RWD kind). My AWD was a viscous coupling type and not necessarily front-biased, there were things that I could do to hold the drift since the rear wheels were pretty much always getting power. However, in a front-biased system like the 4G63T's or CR-V’s, your rears will only get power when the fronts are slipping, as I'd imagine you know by now.

Part of All-wheel-drifting is exactly what the name says: all of the wheels drift. If you watch AWD rally cars you don't usually see the front wheels following the "best line" on the course like RWD cars do (for the most part). A lot of the time the midpoint of an AWD car will be following the best line but the fronts and rears will all be spinning and the steering is toggled back and fourth between almost aimed straight and almost fully counter-steered. This coupled with the insanely high rates of entrance speed helps the car to stay sliding through the turn rather than grinding to a halt on the gravel, but high entry speeds also help keep the car sliding on pavement as well. Most of the time you won’t need to give as much steering input as you feel that you should after the initial “shock” of input to transfer the weight - sometimes only a third to half of a full counter-steer will be plenty to keep you sliding and a full steer will be too much and will whip you back around to the other side.

Although AWD's purpose is to prevent cars from losing traction, you can really use it to your advantage to keep the wheels spinning. If you recall the "traction circle" that you learned in performance-driving kindergarten, you'll remember that the East and West directions represent steering right and left and the North and South directions represent acceleration and braking (respectively). Now, to make a car lose traction, the load on the tires must exceed their ability in any one of those directions or as a combination of two (or more, but that's a bit more advanced).

Let's consider 2 cars with the same specifications, car A having RWD and car B having AWD. When accelerating from a standstill, car A will be sending 100% of the power to the rear wheels only. Granted that car A has the ability to load the tires beyond their capacity, it will break the traction circle and spin the rear wheels. If car B were to send 100% of its power to the driveline, it would momentarily go 100% to the front wheels (in the TSi's case) and break the traction circle causing wheel slippage. The slip sensor will detect this and tell the transmission to take up to 50% from the front and send it to the rear. (NOTE: The initial driving wheels and amount of power distribution will always depend on the AWD system in question) When it does this, the load on the front tires will move to inside the traction circle and the rear wheels' traction circle will look exactly like the front's (ignoring weight and transfer). Simple, right?

Now imagine when a car is going around a turn and power is being applied while there is a constant lateral load on the traction circles of all tires on both cars, during a left turn for example (meaning that the work done on the tires is along the East-West line on the West side). While cornering at half of the capacity of the tires, car A can apply enough power to exceed the traction circle of the rear wheels (the work done by the tires is outside of the traction circle on the upper left side). Meanwhile, the front tires will stay at their half-capacity of lateral load without ever knowing what is happening to the rears. Once a driver counter steers, the direction of lateral load on the front tires is reversed (to the right in a left-turn drift) and they are now working to prevent the car from going off of the track to the left - there's a split second in a feint where the rear is sliding and the fronts are pointed straight just after the body roll has passed neutral. In our left turn, if the driver does a power-over and applies just enough power for the rears to break traction, he can keep the work asked of the tires just beyond the traction circle and maintain control of it, but if he applies too much power the tires will be overwhelmed and the driver will lose control -- this is why higher-powered drift cars need to have the power modulated in order to keep control and keep from spinning while lower power cars can be floored and stay in control.

Ok, the same left turn example with car B and AWD. If the driver applies power in a turn, it may cause the front wheels to exceed the traction circle and transfer power to the rears, which in turn brings both front and rear back within the load limits of the tires, since half of the power is going to the front wheels and half to the back wheels. This would essentially be like driving car A in the same manner but with half the power at the driver's disposal (65hp for a Nissan 240SX, probably not enough to exceed even the stock tires). Even if your TSi has 200hp to the wheels, each set of wheels will see only half of that during a drift, and to get it to slide you either have to be turning harder or going faster to have the work exceed the capabilities of the tires (or use less-sticky tires).

Unless you have tons of power, All-Wheel Drifting techniques require knowledge of vehicle dynamics, your drivetrain, your AWD system, and your traction circle (the best drivers are subliminally imagining all 4 traction circles of all 4 wheels all at the same time all the time). I find that the majority of the time all wheel drifting is spent trying to find ways to "trick" the computer into giving more power to the rear wheels than they can handle. Rocking the steering wheel between neutral and counter-steered one direction is a pretty good way to keep constant load on the outside tires and to find the best steering angle.

You may also want to try doing a moment of very hard braking during the moment of the feint that has the front wheels pointed straight just before turn-in, and then applying maximum power through the apex. Try also varying this so that you don't feint but do sharp braking before the turn-in at a high enough rate of speed that the rear and will swing out, and then try a small steering angle while applying maximum power.

Try getting up some speed (more than you think necessary) and cutting the wheel to one side and then counter steering with favor towards a small steering angle.

You may be able to trick the AWD by pulsing the E-brake but not yanking it when you think the car is close to it’s lateral traction limit when approaching the apex. If you can, try to replicate the effect that rear-only ABS would have but make sure that you fully release before each pull - if your AWD computer is slow enough, it may see the braking moments as representing the “wheels that grip” and send power to those wheels with the power arriving at the rear axle just as you are releasing the brake pressure. Try this technique with the foot brake as well at various times through the turn, both with and without pressing the gas.

I found that most of the operations in drifting an AWD car were pretty full on: full on the gas, full on the brake, etc. In racing they say that you should use smooth motions as to not upset the car's tenuous grip at the limit of traction, but in AWD drifting sometimes you will need to wrestle the car out of traction. Most of the time you will find that unsettling the car will be your best way to break traction while your manipulation of the AWD system will be your best way to maintain control.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: BE SAFE!!! Don’t practice where you may run into something or someone or even where road surfaces are beyond an accepted level of safety. Don’t try and take on more than you feel confident with – drifting may be to-the-limit extreme, but that does not mean being stupid.

Hope this helps and let us know how you make out!

-MR

[Chas]

Its gonna be harder, and you're going to break alot more parts. They are front biased, so id think if you tried to convert to rear, youd need a better rearend. Aren't they soild axel? Maybe a ford rear end to handle the power better. Good luck.

[hachiroku-fc3s]

Not only AWD, but short wheel base. You are gunna have to be an AWESOME drifter just to look like you are doing anything. If you havent gotten it yet and are going to be focused on drifting, Id suggest you get something else, and Im not usually one to do that.

[mranlet]

Short wheel base?

Only .2" shorter than the S13's (97.2" vs 97.4")

The rediculous power will make up for it.

I never broke anything in my Legacy Turbo and that was up in the 3-400 hp range. I did relocate the rear end and transmission so that my axles were straight and level rather than being cocked at angles.

The AWD DSM's are built strong - you've got a good platform!

Besides, nobody else on this forum knows anything except for me, especially that Chas guy...

-MR

[Chas]

Are you f****** kidding me? hahahah

Legacy is made by subaru, a good japanese compant
Eclispe is made by chrysler, a crappy company.