First Ride

With newly completed body mounted and ready to go, I went out to a parking lot near my house which had a pretty smooth finish on it. It's what is called a broom finish, where they take a broom and lightly sweep the concrete surface just before it has completely cured. This way the concrete is still very smooth, but there's enough texture so that cars don't all become drifters when it rains.

From a complete standstill, I can grab a handful of throttle and make it spin out and keep spinning and keep spinning and...well, you get the idea. After that fun wore out, I decided to actually try to figure eight drifting exercise as outlined on the box. Now the key to initiating the drift seems to be to let off the throttle as you initiate the turn, thus loading the front end and making it easier for the rear to break traction. This worked great, but I found that I was having trouble holding the drift as the tires would still hook up shortly after it started sliding. I attributed this to the broom finish of the concrete coupled with the fact that despite the tires being very hard rubber, they are still rubber.

I then did a few high speed passes followed by throwing the car into a turn, and even at full speed, the actual drift would not last very long. Certainly nothing you would consider to be worthy of some of the scenes from Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. If anything, these turns reminded me of car chase scenes where the car would blast out from a side street and skid momentarily into oncoming traffic before racing off into the distance. Fun, but not drifting.

So I headed off to my old junior high school, which has a long stretch of extremely smooth concrete out in the back of the school. We're talking about the type of surface that gets REALLY slippery when it rains. I put the car down, rolled on the throttle, and what a difference! If anything, it was so loose that it was difficult to maintain control, i.e. avoid hitting the wall or numerouse metal posts because the walkway is only about 8' wide. I'm sure that if I had more space, it would be a little easier to do the figure eight exercise. Unfortunately, my battery decided to expend itself so it was back to the house for me.

The next step will be for me to buy additional wheels so that I can mount the ABS plastic drift tires that I bought off of eBay. These should allow me to get the lack of traction that is desirable for the textured concrete of parking lots and streets that are immediately accessible.