Police in Oakland, California broke up a series of illegal street drifting sideshows last weekend, with two police officers reportedly injured, close to 100 cars being towed, and at least two people arrested.

“Are you writing this up already?” they asked as I did some other busywork in the hotel room, the morning coming to a close in the hotel room the day after. “No, should I?” Tom from the Front Street drift crew offered a headline: “I went street drifting with the Front Street Crew and it fucking sucked.” To be fair, it…

Over the past few years, the drift scene in America has been changing. Underglow is back. Chrome is back. Flames and metalflake paintjobs glitter at little tracks across the country. After years of watching, we’re finally making a pilgrimage to the epicenter.

Take a look at Matt Panic’s 1973 Toyota. Under the hood is Toyota’s famed BEAMS engine from the 2000s, the last evolution of a long line of little twin-cam four-cylinders. What makes Mark’s interesting is that it has so much intake noise it sounds like it could ingest a nearby horse.

More and more old, light, reasonably modern rear-wheel-drive cars on the used market are ending up trashed, crashed, and rusted out. What is a car enthusiast to do? Convert a different old, light reasonably modern front-wheel-drive car to shred at the back.

Over the past few weeks we have been dutifully studying video clips of the new mid-engine Corvette to try to hear if the car is V6 or V8, turbo or not. As a reference, here is what a car of great turbocharging sounds like.

Today is a normal day for me, and by that I mean I was looking up pictures and video of Kazuya Bai’s D1GP pro drift car, which is amazing. But then I stumbled upon Bai’s entry on the D1GP website and it showed not only Bai’s current photo for 2018, but also his photos over the past four years. This is genius.

Every year after Formula Drift New Jersey, pro cars and drivers wheel themselves over to nearby Englishtown to run with the regular ClubLoose bros. Pro Bro Down, it’s called, and it’s a perfect mix of the newest tech in drifting and also total grassroots builds.

The seller of today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe 240SX says he tried keeping it in the family but his relatives are either not cool enough for it, or are too broke. Let’s see if the price means it’s not them but him.

The AE86 Toyota Corolla isn’t fast. It’s not beautiful. It’s not exotic. It’s not anything that anyone would immediately single out as why a car is good. And yet the world loves it.

BMW, being German, keeps a historical archive. Luckily for me, it’s searchable, so you can go look up your favorite Z3 brochure or whatever. I decided to see what would come up if I just typed in “drift.” As it turned out, solid gold hits.

Drifting is a high stress automotive activity. Wheel speeds go from 100 to zero and back again with a pull of the handbrake. Engines wail at the limiter at high G with little forward air flow. Everybody blows up. Everybody crashes. But in between, it looks like this.

Before the Dodge Chargers were dragging safes through Rio in improbable bank heists, before the orange Toyota Supra, before living your life a quarter-mile at a time, before Dom and Letty and Brian, there was just Stephan Papadakis, his friends, and Los Angeles.

Driving down New Jersey’s Route 34, you immediately knew who was going to Formula Drift and who was not. A long file of lowered Subaru WRXs, stanced BRZs, enloudened Mitsubishi Evos and lowered Volkswagen Golfs, right turn blinkers flashing frenetically, awaited their turn into the stadium parking lot during one…

Ever since the Tesla Model 3 debuted we’ve been wondering a nagging question. Questions about its production rate, build quality, and worker conditions were all mere breezes rustling past our ears compared to The Big One. The Thing On All Of Our Minds. Can the Tesla Model 3 drift? It turns out that yes, yes it can.

What makes Formula Drift different from all of the other racing series in America is not just the variety of cars that show up—everything from V8-swapped 1990s Nissan 240SXs to a 900 horsepower twin-supercharged Ferrari—it’s that they’re all competitive.

I hadn’t realized how dark it’d gotten until the fuse blew. The stadium lights flooding the road course at Englishtown blinked out and briefly, for the first time all day, the blare of drift cars stopped.

The most famous corners in racing are all about elevation change: Eau Rouge at Spa, The Corkscrew at Laguna Seca, the Minami jump at Ebisu. Now, please welcome the“Roller Coaster From Hell,” recently run for the first time at Estonia’s Kehala Ring.

I’ve long maintained that drifters are the new hot rodders, but it was still surprising to me when I heard Chris Forsberg’s Nissan 370Z Formula Drift pro car with an 800-plus horsepower VQ V6. This car idles like a big block gasser.

What makes a good driver isn’t how you drive when everything goes right; it’s how you drive when everything goes wrong.