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Well we went drifting for the first time yesterday in my friend's '93 Altima. And when we drifted it the car would just pretty much stick. In the end of drifts we would just stop and that would be the end of our drifts. Were we doing something wrong?
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Yeah, you were 'drifting' a front wheel drive car. -
Oh, ok sorry I thought it was a rear wheel drive car.Comment
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No Comment. Mr. No One Better.
Matt.Comment
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Well i dont know much bout older Nissans.Comment
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Anyone that has spinners as theyre avatar shouldnt know much about it. :\Comment
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There's your first lesson to learn, what makes a fwd, rwd, and awd different when drifting.
When you're not using the throttle, every platform is the same. However, when you start to hit the gas, things get very different between fwd, rwd, and awd platforms. Don't expect to drift like a rwd car in a fwd car, won't happen.
Basically it's like this:
FWD - when you start to push on the throttle, the front tires start to pull the car in the direction that you have the wheel turned. As well, you use up some of the front tires' overall grip when you start to try to accelerate. In most cases, when you hit the gas, your front end will come out and you'll have understeer. When you start a drift, you counter with the slide. However, when you start to give gas, you want to quickly turn into the slide as you roll on the throttle. You may find the ability to actually pull the front end around a little with the throttle and heavy steering into the corner...or...you may find that you don't have enough overall front traction to even use much throttle if any and you may need to either stay off the throttle or possibly use a little bit of braking to hold the slide. This depends on the car's weight balance and suspension setup.
RWD - when you get on the throttle, you take away some rear sideways traction for some forward acceleration. This allows you to both hold a slide and maintain speed or even increase speed during a drift. This is one tremendous advantage over a fwd platform. Also in a rwd, you keep steering into the slide when you hit the gas. You control the front end with steering and the rear with throttle...in a basic sense, but it's more complicated than that. Drifting is a balance between both throttle/braking AND steering at the same time. Either one will actually affect the whole car.
AWD - this is a combination of both. The techniques used are actually a mix of both fwd and rwd techniques. You have the ability to pull the front end around with throttle and steering like a fwd, but the rear end can get loosened up by the throttle. Drifting becomes less of a throttle balance but more of a steering balance under throttle. It's goofy, but basically off throttle is the same as any other and on throttle is half way between fwd and rwd. You kind of just gas it and steer the drift with the wheel, not much counter steer if any when under throttle, depends on car balance/suspension setup. Also, drift angles are not as showy as rwd but better than fwd, and can be quite fast around corners with 4 wheel acceleration.
Hopefully the above gives you a slight idea of how each platform works. Fwd is fine to start with. You can learn some basic techniques, basically weight shifting primarily - feint and braking drift and e-brake if you've got a hand one.
Also, one last note: A friend's car should not be drifted. I don't think he'd want his car totalled. Use your own, use something cheap and expendable.Comment
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Thanks alot man hopefully that will help me decide on what platform I want to get. And also about my friend's car(not to sound like a smart *Censored**Censored**Censored*)... he doesn't care beacause hes getting ready to redo it so he let us do whatever we wanted as long as it wasn't a big dent or something on purpose.Comment
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