Tanner Foust’s guide to Formula Drift

Thank Keiichi Tsuchiya. He's the ‘Drift King', and the reason you're not even reading these words and instead staring goggle-eyed at the massively sideways, massively smokey 900bhp drift-Passat in the picture above.

That modified Volkswagen Passat is owned and campaigned by Top Gear USA host Tanner Foust: a two-time Formula Drift champion himself, Rallycross extraordinaire and generally all-round Mr Excellent. Think of him as the motorsport world's very own Captain America.

Foust explains to Top Gear how drifting took off and captured the hearts of madmen across the globe.

"Tsuchiya was a sports car driver in Japan back in the day," he says, "and when he would be leading a race, on the last couple of turns he would do a big drift - a kind of premature celebration. And he slowly became more popular for the drifting than the actual racing."

Sensing an open goal, Tsuchiya-san started a series where fellow sideways enthusiasts could drift against each other competitively. Eventually it reached the States, morphing into what is now known as ‘Formula Drift'.

"Formula Drift is now more popular than any other drifting series in the world," reckons Tanner.

Why? We quizzed Tanner to give us the full lowdown on how it works, and why it's great. If you can tear yourself away from looking at the pictures of SIDEWAYS SMOKEYNESS, we suspect you'll want to join in the fun...

"It starts off with 40 or 50 cars," explains Tanner, "and one at a time they'll go out and drift on their own, and get judged in order to qualify for the next round of 32."

Each driver is judged on three criteria: the drift line, the drift angle, and the style/overall impression the drift makes on the judges.

The drift line is defined by inner and outer clipping zones, while the angle is the degree of slip the driver achieves over the course of the qualifying pass. Both these criteria get a score between 1 and 25, and points are awarded for "pushing the limits in as many places as possible," and for smooth transitions from one corner to the next.

The style element, however, is the unique part of FD.

"It's very subjective, in terms of points," explains Tanner, "which can be frustrating, but also one of its greatest strengths. I mean, there's really only one person at the end of the weekend who's really happy with the judging, and that's the guy who's won everything...

So if it looks insane, or indeed, if it looks hugely dangerous but the driver manages to pull it off, he's rewarded.

"If you're able to come in really committed to a slide that's the key. The closer you come to crashing (and not crash), the better you score," he says. A true Top Gear philosophy, then? "Yes," laughs Tanner. "Exactly."

"Only the top 32 drifters from the first round will go into the tandem rounds," explains Tanner, "and that's where you get paired [the top qualifier is paired with the 32nd, the second with the 31st and so forth]. It's actually really fun, but if you look at all the things happening, it's incredibly difficult.

"It really is chaos."

Each driver takes a turn leading, with the guy behind ‘shadowing' the leader's moves. "The speed difference on the round of 32 is crazy," says Tanner. "You have to know where everybody brakes, otherwise they'll crash you out."

From 32, it's whittled down to 16, then eight, four, two, and eventually a winner.

"When you get to the top four, everybody kind of drives the same," Tanner explains. "So for the round of 32, it's a great show, but from eight onwards the cars are incredibly fast and close, and then it gets really awesome."

"It's the most unique line-up of competitive cars in the world," says Tanner. "You have cars like mine, a 900bhp Volkswagen Passat, 1000bhp Nissans both old and new, BMW M3s with 1000bhp, nitrous and turbocharged engines. It's just absolutely ridiculous."

The Formula D cars are also trend-setters, Tanner reckons. "You see body-kits on those cars that'll make their way onto the street, especially in Southern California. So as crazy as they look, three years later you'll see those kits being driven down the highway."

There's also very little in the way of ‘rules'. "The only regulation is the maximum width tyre you can use," says Tanner. "It's the weight of your car in lbs, minus one digit."

So if you car weighs 2950lbs, your maximum tyre width is 295mm. That's it. Other than that, pretty much anything goes. How excellent is that?

"In a lot of racing, there's one team that has more money than anybody else, and there's a little bit of bitterness about sponsors and so forth, or having more money blah blah blah," Tanner laughs.

"But in drifting, the guy with the $20,000 car can take down the guy with the $300,000 car. It's also more of a mellow atmosphere between the drivers, and strangely, they're all pretty friendly towards one another."

"Everybody knows that it doesn't matter who you are - you make a simple mistake and you'll get beat by anyone in the room." Sort of puts F1 into context, no?

Though you can rock up with pretty much any make or model, the staple vehicle in drifting is probably the Nissan 240 (200SX for us Europeans), says Tanner.

"They were sold with turbocharged engines, had good weight distribution and people were making parts for the steering so you could get good steering angle out of them."

Tanner's recipe for a budget, starter-kit drift car to compete? "Get an S14 generation Nissan 240, with an [GM] LS V8 motor in it. You can get super cheap parts for it, and the LS motor is cheap, reliable and lightweight. It's an aluminium V8 and you can get 500bhp out of it and still daily drive the thing.

"You can be strangely competitive with that car."

"The fans in drifting are incredibly loyal," says Tanner. "Loyal like European football fans, but they are very car-centric and are willing to travel a long way to see you."

We point out they're probably less fighty than European football fans, though. Tanner agrees. "Yeah, they're not tearing down stadiums, but you might get the occasional beach ball that makes its way through the stands."

It's a place where a 900bhp, nitrous-equipped, V8-engined Volkswagen Passat is considered normal

"It's pretty customary in drifting to get creative with your builds," explains Tanner. Hence why he's got the most unlikely drift car in the history of the sport: a Passat.

He laughs at this suggestion. "It's perfect then, right?"

It produces 700bhp from the engine alone, but there's a special, nitrous-flavoured surprise in the last 10 per cent of throttle travel.

"If you ever get in a scenario where you need to change the colour of the cloud of smoke coming out of the back of the car from grey to white, you just push your foot to the floor for an additional 200bhp shot of nitrous," grins Tanner.

It also sounds off-the-chain incredible.

"We had the engine mashed completely against the firewall, and there wasn't enough room for the headers, so the headers go forward into the front bumper and then they go into an eight to one accumulator that is all equal length.

"The firing order of the engine spirals around the accumulator, so you hear every cylinder. Normally in a V8, you hear pairs of cylinders, so this one sounds like it's revving at 14,000rpm when it's only doing 7,000rpm. It's awesome."

Video: Watch Tanner's 900bhp drift Passat in action