What is Drift racing, insights from the Drift Masters European Championship

Irish Tech News was recently invited to cover the Drift Masters European Championship final in Warsaw Poland. By Aaron Faulkner.

Drift racing is an emerging sport in the racing community. It focuses on not driving straight but instead on guiding the car sideways through corners and checkpoints. As such the cars and tracks vary hugely from the standard NASCAR track or the F1 style where all cars must be optimized intensely for their role.

What is Drift racing, insights from Drift Masters

Drifting is also different from contemporary points in that it is not all about simply who comes first but drivers are graded on a points-based system. This system works with a few criteria:

• speed, each corner is supposed to be taken as fast as you can while maintaining the line.
• Angle, the car must have a significant amount of angle, the more the better, however, this slows down the car so it is a balancing factor between this and speed.
• The line is the predetermined zone that the judges set out that the drivers have to travel as close as possible to. This is marked out by clipping zones and clipping points, points being on the inside and zones being on the outside of the turns. You basically want to keep the bonnet of the car as close to the clipping points as possible and the boot as close to the clipping zones as possible.
• Style, which primarily focuses on showmanship. This could mean a victory donut, aggression, and making the racing as enjoyable as possible. As much burnt rubber as possible.

Contestants are pitted against each other in this way in a one-on-one style format in a series of eliminations with a maximum of 100 points up for grabs in each run. In the eliminations, they follow the format of tandem runs, with one car being the lead car and the other one imitating the lead car. Drivers switch places after each run, ensuring a level playing field. These runs make up a massive amount of the sport and are a spectacle to watch

As such drift masters is an incredibly new and emerging sport, with this being the largest attendance for a final to date, being at 52000 people in the stadium. The stadium itself was a lovely venue, extremely modern and well furnished, and quite comfortable hosting the people.

Outside of the main event itself, the exterior was covered in cars representing either racing history, drift history, or big milestones in Poland’s car culture, like the Delorian, Mitsubishi Lancer (hugely popular drifting car), and Ferraris. As such this created a wonderful atmosphere for the main event the championship itself.

The main event was a cacophony of noise and rubber and a genuine pleasure to watch, the races were organized in a series of small one-on-one bites with two drivers competing against each other in a series of eliminations. These created quite a good flow to the event with there being a minute or two between each race where the next racers would “warm up their tires” (do donuts and skids) allowing viewers to get up and grab a drink or anything else. As such the atmosphere of the event was extremely positive with everyone having a good time and enjoying the spectacle of the cars.

In regards to the cars themselves, as drift racing is a somewhat contact racing sport quite a bit of spectacle was watching the trackside mechanics and the mechanics back in the pits attempt to fix and coach life back into the cars and keep them running in what can only be called a herculean endurance race, with many cars taking exceptionally bad damage that they were forced to drop out of the competition.

With the speed and the nature of drifting itself this happened quite a lot throughout both days with the cars looking like something from a Mad Max movie by the end of the second day but still managing to deafen the crowd with the engines.

For myself, this sport and this event would be an instant recommendation even for those who are just mildly interested in cars and racing in general, I feel that the future of this sport is extremely bright and will be worth following into the future .

The event was sponsored by G2A

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