for a fellow floridian, in the first rain after i chipped and changed the dv valve in my 00 avant, i started drifting in the target parking lot. surprised the hell outta me. easy as pie in the wet down here. in support of the a4 vs miata, my old mr2 spyder out handled miata's all day, and my a4 handles at least as well the spyder.

 

I'm pretty sure all of you are confusing drifting with power sliding.

 

FYI: in a FWD car you can do like some1 had sed a controlled slide... well idk u tell me if you this on a road you wouldnt consider this a drift.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1KLN...ed&search=

it is pissible to do some "drifting" in FWD... but obviously not as well as a RWD or AWD

 

That is drifting, but he did a ****-poor job of it. That's why he's practicing.

 

I suppose I'll throw my 2 cents in.

I live in Buffalo, NY, and got my B.S. in Mech eng in Potsdam (waaaaay upstate NY, i swear it's sub-zero for weeks at a time). Up in potsdam, they don't salt the roads very much, since it's usually too cold for the salt to do any good. (the melting point of water can only go so low from the addition of salt, and lots of times the ambient temps are lower than that).

So, most of the village streets and the back country roads are a solid snowpack for a couple months. I love it. in the winter, you see pavement, it might be black ice. it might be dry, it might be wet, who knows what the coefficient of friction is. With snowpack, it's the same cF everywhere you go. (less than it might be if you salted of course, but it's consistent, which is awesome).

So, when i started school, i had a 94 Mazda 626 V6, and i learned how to drift using the ebrake and weight transfer. Obviously this was easy to learn with, since it doesn't take any ***** to rip the e-brake coming into a corner and work your way out. (it does take ***** to hammer the gas in the middle of the corner with rwd/awd). So i learned how to fwd drift pretty well, i only used the e-brake to initiate the drift, so it was just a pop-ebrake and slam it down really quick, and then just modulating the throttle and steering to keep it sideways. Of course, you lose speed through the corner, so occasionally i had to pop the ebrake for a second to keep it going sideways.

Then junior year, I sold it and got an '83 porsche 944 n/a. That thing is a drift machine! I had blizzaks on of course (great snow tires), and I swear, wherever i drove in the winter, it was a rarity if I wasn't sideways. I learned how to do a bunch of drift techniques...

Power-over: The easiest, just hit the gas mid-corner to flip the back end out.

Feint: I think this is the same as the "scandinavian flick". If the corner is to the right, you start on the inside, turn left a little to the outside (to transfer the weight to the right side of the car), then cut hard to the right, swinging all the weight back to the other side, breaking the rear end loose.

Braking: Coming into a corner, if you brake hard enough while turning just slightly, you can get enough weight on the front end that the rear end just loses traction by itself, no gas needed. This is tough on snow, usually you can't brake hard enough without the ABS coming on or skidding the front tires.

Dirt drop: sometimes, when I wanted to drift on wet roads (say they had been salted), I could just dip my back tires into a bit of snow near the side of the road to get the drift started, and then once the back end was loose, just keep it going with the throttle.

I've done a lot of drifting, and call me ricer, i don't care. I've learned SO much about the dynamics and physics of handling a car. I feel confident on any surface, and the skills learned transfer to daily dry driving too.

They've served me well in autocross... I race my dad's supercharged 99 miata, race springs and koni adjustable shocks, and it's the same physics, just the coefficient of friction is higher, so you have to compensate. I can feel when my rear end's about to break loose, I know how to handle it when something unexpected happens, I attribute a lot of my driving skill to effing around on the deserted back roads in the middle of nowhere, NY.

I'm really excited about learning to really control AWD this winter. I've done some hard driving on the A4 (new to me this year) this summer, and I love the feel of it. You can induce a little oversteer if you toss the weight around, and it's very neutral otherwise. I can't wait to use pc-16 power in the winter, I think it's going to be fun as hell.

Also, so you know I'm not completely bullsh*tting you, here's a little drift my roomate caught of me last year - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10TPjBGpLmI

And there's a couple of other videos if youre interested, although some include pocketbike racing and my roomate drifting his f-150 (he's not that good, haha), and me roadracing (motorcycles) at the track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf9mUw-gp_A - sorry, the camerawork isn't that great, and you can't even tell i'm drifting in most of the in-car shots. (just look at the angle of the headlights, i guess.

 

There's a reason why FWD is not allowed in the D1.

And I would not call that drifting in the video...not even power sliding.

What you do in a FWD car is put the car into a slide that's really not controlled. The reason I say it's not a controlled slide is as soon as you start to control it (throttle) you're recovering from the slide and no longer "sliding".

This is pretty much impossible in a FWD car. The reason why is if your wheels are pointing in the opposite direction (opposite lock) and you give it power you're going to go in the direction your wheels are pointing and not in the direction of the turn.

I know the definition of drifting and powersliding can vary and I copied that straight from wikipedia, but I couldn't find another good resource in 5 mins of searching.

From D1: " The goal is to apply enough power to the rear wheels to break the tires' traction and initiate a slide, or "drift". Once a drift is initiated, it must be maintained through the turn using a precise balance of power, braking and steering."

The key phrase there is "through the turn" not just into the turn.

 

that's freakin great, I am thinking that when the weather cools off (hopefully by then I'll have my shocks and springs/chip) I'll stick my stock wheels back on and hit the local autoX...I've gone to see it a few times, and I really want to see what kind of times my a4 can put down....

 

buy a 350z.

 

Or how about not. G-Stock is a fun class to run in, and in the road rally's up here, Audi + Quattro is king. I'd love to see some smacktard in a 350Z try to run on the snow covered roads in New Hampshire/Vermont.

 

This is what I will forever think of the skandonavian flick when it is mentioned. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcRAP...ed&search=