Good luck drifting your FWD vehicle. hehe

 

I thought of that response before I even read the post. Unless you've got bald tires in the back and it's flooded three inches deep out there, you will not be kicking the tail of a Maxima out on a turn!

While a very well balanced FWD may be drifted, a front heavy car like the Max cannot be coaxed into that maneuver without a crazy stunt.

 

uhhh...heavy on the e-brake(or parking brake)...but i wouldn't do it...

 

But when I'm going fast on an entrance/exit ramp, or doing a higher speed u-turn, I can "snap" the steering wheel harder into the direction of the turn for a moment and it causes the rear end to rotate out. It's saved me a couple times and got the car's nose pointed back in the right direction when the car has started to naturally understeer. My tires are worn a bit, but they are by no means bald, and I've never had traction problems.

 

If you are really pushing it, and you "snap" the wheel anywhere...your goin in the ditch.

The fastest way around any corner is smooth with as little sliding in any direction as you can manage.


TURN FAST has some great articles on the subject. I recommend that everyone take some kind of advanced handling course from a real race school too. I went to the one at Road Atlanta a few years ago and it helped me more than you can imagine.

 

i drifted in my 92 SE. i was doing about 45 in a parking lot and there was a little island i was going to turn around. so i decided i was going too fast to make the turn without wrecking, so i slammed on the brakes, the wheels locked, let out the brakes, cut the wheel real hard to the right, slammed the brakes again, when the turn was done, i let go and rolled into a parking space, all my co-workers asked me why i used the ebrake..i didnt use it perfectly clean drift around the little cement island thing. i wouldnt ever try to do it again because it was definatly a fluke. by the way, i have some pretty crappy tires, not bald, but still crappy.

 

Just a note, "drifting" and drift are not the same thing. Drifting as it was made popular in Japan is constantly doing an oversteer powerslide though a turn and through multiple turns. Hard if not impossible to do in a FWD car.

 

Very few people choose to drift in an FF(front engine, front drive) car. Using the handbrake is too hard for some, and the actual drift doesn't last anywhere near as long. The other issue is that since you have to lock up your rear wheels to do an FF drift, it's very hard on those tires. Flat-spotting is very common. FF drifters usually take off their good tires and put on a set of old, worn out ones to drift. Then they put the good ones back on. I also thought I'd mention that FF drifting is usually done with something like a Civic hatch. A Maxima would be much too big and heavy. Forget it.
Most people go with FRs(front engine, rear drive). They just let you do more with drifting.

The_Quorum: You did an itty-bitty drift, but like you said, most people would call it a 'rotation,' or just oversteer(or in your case, just enough). I've done it on a dirt road before in the Altima I used to have.

mzmtg: Turnfast is a great site, I've been there a few times. I also bought a book a few weeks ago that was written by Ross Bentley. It was very good, and I'm working on sharpening up on things like line-taking and pedal modulation{kinda hard, I wear a 16 shoe}.