I don’t have what it takes to be a racing driver. Maybe it’s because I haven’t actually tasted a podium finish in a proper race car, so I don’t know how to weigh the joys of victory over the consequences of a crash, or maybe it’s because I have to write a check if I break something, or maybe it’s because I can’t ever seem to find the last tenth of a percent that means the difference between first and fifth place. I will never be talented enough to be a professional racing driver, and I will never be rich enough to be a gentleman driver. I can live with that. I’m not a pro driver, but I play one on TV. Driving fast on TV and driving fast in a race are not the same thing. As you’ve doubtlessly heard Jeremy Clarkson mention in the now defunct “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car” segment on Top Gear, “if it looks slow, it’s probably fast.” Unless you’re on the very ragged edge of grip, riding that limit like Senna at Monaco, your fast lap will not appear dramatic on camera. Even in instances where I’ve flown by a sketchily-placed camera at what feels like an absolutely incredible speed—three, four times the speed limit—on screen it looks slow as dog shit sliding down a glass window. Dull. Unimpressive. Bleh. Then I started working with Chris Harris. I mention Chris a lot because he’s someone I look up to, the consummate professional. He’s always ready to work no matter how hard we’ve partied the night before, has a quick wit, and, in general, is more diplomatic than I am when it comes to dealing with manufacturers. Plus, mentioning that Chris Harris is also on Top Gear is great for the SEO.

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That intro to Chris was just fluff, really. I can talk about professionalism all day long and fill words for my weekly column, but what I’m really getting at is this: the man can slide a car, any car, rear drive, front drive, fucking any car, like practically no one I’ve ever seen. And sliding, my friends, is how you make a car look fast on camera. I once saw Harris huck a Mercedes CLA45 into a nearly reverse entry slide, spinning all four wheels (but the fronts more than the the rears). I didn’t even think that was possible, and the procedure he gave me to do it was so complicated, to this day I couldn’t tell you how to slide that car. And he does it so calmly, the first time, every time, that it’s impossible not to be equal parts angry and envious. So began the “first one’s free” hit down the drifting rabbit hole. Like Golf, race driving, or extreme motorsports like Freestyle MotoX , the pro’s make drifting look incredibly easy. Watch Tanner Foust or Vaughn Gittin Jr slide a car, and it appears to be a thoughtless process, an automated drift macro that can be programmed in realtime to work with any car. But the real skill is being able to do it in not just your prepped race car, but any car, any time. How the hell do they do that

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The answer is, the same way I can heel-toe any manual transmission in the first 30 seconds of driving it. By feel. When I first started learning to drive a manual gearbox, every shifter and every clutch was different—bouncing from car-to-car had a learning curve. I remember 20-year-old Matt Farah commenting to a friend that my C5 Corvette had a “difficult transmission because the gears were so close together.” This will seem immediately ridiculous to the 50% of the population who’s ever driven a car with a T56. Over time, and with lots of practice, that learning curve got shorter, from days, to hours, to minutes, and now, to seconds. The pros look at a 90 mph slide the same way I look at a gear change—just do it and adjust in real time. But the difference between learning a gearbox quickly and hucking a car into a triple digit slide is this: balls. Huge ones. Huge balls which I do not (yet) possess. However, with 1 or 2 practice runs to feel out the car, I can do a basic slide for the camera. Here’s how: A drift is broken into three parts, which makes it sound super easy when you tell someone how to do it. In reality, this is really hard. The Entry – The driver breaks the back end of the car loose by turning in harder than normal and applying throttle, using the handbrake, or “flicking” the car away from, then into the corner and using weight transfer to unsettle the rear, then taking a breath as the car ‘s own sideways momentum slows it down. The Balance – The entry is the most violent part of the drift, the balance recovers control of the car by keeping the front wheels where you want the car to actually go and rolling into medium throttle to keep the revs near, but not at the top of the powerband. You need a little bit left to work with. For the Exit. You balance the throttle with countersteer: more throttle means more angle; less throttle and the car begins to straighten itself out. The Exit – Conventional wisdom says that you should lift off the throttle to straighten the car out in an oversteer situation, but to exit a drift you actually hold and even increase the amount of throttle while slowly unwinding the wheel and straightening the car. Staying in the throttle on the exit will keep the weight shifted over the rear wheels and provide more stability. If you lift on the exit, the car’s weight will transfer forward, the front wheels will stick and the rears will suddenly grip and snap in the other direction, leading to a spin. Stay on steady power, and straighten the car out. Boom. Hero. Ok, so that’s the basics of a single corner drift right there. Seems like a lot of words, but it would take just as many to teach you how to take the same corner clean. The idea is to find a harmony, a balance, when the car is sliding. Smooth inputs, smaller inputs than you think, and driving by touch more than by data.