The other day I saw some older drift videos in my Facebook feed. I was struck with just how different drifting looked in the early 2000’s compared to now. I decided to do some digging and find the earliest clips from the D1GP I could find and managed to find this gem:
It’s amazing just how tame that looks, and that was the pinnacle of the sport about 15 years ago. The builds are very mild, take away the stickers, and these cars are run of the mill street builds today. The angles are low, as is the smoke. There’s something about this level of drifting that I just find more appealing however. Maybe it’s the fact that I feel like I could hit the track and do more or less the same thing in my own car (for the record, I could not, but still). Or maybe it’s plain nostalgia as this was the era where I was first getting into drifting: ordering bootleg VHS tapes from eBay, and watching low quality clips from various p2p sharing networks.
Either way, it’s hard not to be amazed at how far pro level drifting has come.