Flutterby™! : Drift 2005-04-07 18:28:22.953116+00

Drift

2005-04-07 18:28:22.953116+00 by Dan Lyke 10 comments

If you have any interest in people doing to cars and tires things that should not be done, then fire up Windows Media Player and take a look at this.

It would be cute to see the same drivers try the same thing in a Porsche 911... Expecially a pre-1969 model. They are having too much fun with understeer. I'd like to see what they do with oversteer!

#Comment Re: made: 2005-04-07 20:39:21.482044+00 by: meuon [edit history]

Methinks that was with skinny very hard tires.. not things you would normally want to be using anyway. I could be wrong.. but on Asphalt circa 1980 I could do a 360 if the road was slick at about 60 mph with 60 series tires but just barely. Braking the rear end loose they way they were doing it was just weird. But then, I was always trying to get tires to stick, not slip. And I have to add.. on a decent surface, our little AWD Outback Sport will not slip. I'll have to find looser gravel.

Eric, funny you should mention... Got a friend who bought the 6 speed Nissan Sentra for autocross driving. On his first few days out he was the second slowest guy on the track, the slowest being someone who'd bought some $100k+ Porsche and was discovering that dollars didn't make you a better driver.

Meuon, same friend (who doesn't drift, by the way, just drives autocross) has a DVD called The Drift Bible that I may have to borrow just so that I understand the physics a little better. I'm sure, given what I think is the power to weight ratio of most drifter's cars, that they're tuning other things in weird and wacky ways and actually traveling slower than we'd guess.

Hmm. Reminds me of how much fun I had with two of my favorite RWD cars. One was a Camaro, and the other was a somewhat unlikely 1967 VW Beetle with a 1974 SuperBeetle engine transplanted into it. The latter went around with just a little tweak of the throttle if the road had any moisture at all on it.

#Comment Re: made: 2005-04-08 11:46:25.454428+00 by: ebradway [edit history]

The RWD/rear-engine combo of the Beetle is the same as the 911, only the 911 adds more horsepower and a greater ratio of weight behind the rear wheels. That engine is heavy. I've personally had both a 911 engine and a pancake from a '74 bus ont he garage floor. My father and I could lift the pancake ourselves. The 3.2l Porsche engine we could barely get to rotate on the floor with both of us bracing our backs against the wall and using our legs.

And the 911 is probably not the best car for autocross. You HAVE

to be proficient at heel-toe braking in order to keep it out of a slide. The 911 is a great rally car, however, as it can pull through turns like its on rails (again, using heel-toe braking and maybe speed-shifting).

I was watching one of the 'car shows' on TV one day and they showed two Honda's.. one 'Tuned to the Max' - The other one bone stock with good (Michellin?) tires. With a trained and 'good' driver in the tuned car, and a professional driver in the stock car they did all the standards.. 1/4 mile, slolom, timed laps on a gymkhana course.. and in all cases except the 1/4 mile the stock car with the pro driver blew the "tuned" car away. Then the pro driver did the same in the 'Tuned' car and beat himself in the stock car's numbers by a fair margin. The show's premise was 'spend some of that money on a real driving school experience'.

I was at Road Atlanta a few years back with some other Porsche 911 owners on an open track day. I wasn't driving that day. We were just watching and chatting. There was a kid there with a late-90s Toyota Supra driving. I could see the disdain in my colleagues' eyes for the kid. I was impressed that he would be out here spending about $150/hr for track time. Of course, his Supra blew the socks off some of the other cars running that day, including several Porsche 914s and an original Austin Mini Cooper.

And yes, there are many, many tales of 4-banger 914s blowing the doors off less experienced drivers in really hot 911s.

Ok, it had a Rochester quad carb and 60's, but it's still not the car; it's the driver.

My favorite trick was leaving them at the light because it *looked* like I was looking at them, while I was watching the light out of the corner of my eye. They rarely were. :-)

re: the 1967 drift Beetle, I currently drive a Porsche 914 and am trying to sell my 1958 Bug. Those earlier bugs have swingaxle transmissions as opposed to the later implemented IRS (independent rear suspension) trannys. Swingaxles (without addition of a zbar/camber compensator) exhibit similar cornering characteristics to the Corvair, and can be helped by decambering the rear a bit (although I can't recommend that to any sane person who wants to drive the damn bug for transportation). Swingaxles are still used for drag racing a lot for some reason - I dunno why, maybe they're just more direct. That said, I can break the rear loose on the '58 whenever I choose, and oftentimes when I DON'T choose. It can be a truly frightening drive, and the oversteer on it in certain corners is so deceptive that you swear you'll end up in the ditch the next time.

Hanging a heavier engine out back there would be scary - the suspension setup on the older Porsche's was a bit better I think. Those cars are very much a 'slow in/fast out' kind of thing compared to other autos.

The Porsche 914 is so goddamned civilized compared to the bug, and I can still work on it like the vw, so I'm pretty happy with it. If I was going to get all crazy with it (without loading a porsche 6 cyl into it - expensive as hell) I'd want to see about fitting a Subaru turbo engine into it and routing a radiator. That would provide for some brown trousers. Historically the 914 has gone great guns at the track, much to the anger of 911 owners. Maybe that's why the Boxster has a mixed fanclub nowadays...