From the website:
Catch My Drift?
Driving Daredevils
Now Skate on Rubber
Hitting the Skids Is Point
Of Sport for Car-Crazy
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU and SHOLNN FREEMAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
IRWINDALE, Calif. -- Things weren't looking so good for drifter Ken Gushi. He had just smacked a wall, damaging his Nissan 240SX. His father was tired of all the crashing.
Trying to shake a case of nerves, the 16-year-old Mr. Gushi forced a smile for the cameras and the crowd. "I'm cool," he said. "It's all good." He still had another heat to drive in an event that on Aug. 31 officially brought big-time drifting to the U.S.
Mr. Gushi doesn't even have his driver's license yet. But he's a rising star in drifting, a sport in which drivers intentionally put their cars into sideways skids on curves. "My friends all talk about girls all the time," Mr. Gushi says. "All I dream about is drifting."
Drifting, which got its start on the twisty mountain roads of back-country Japan, hopped the Pacific and over the years has found a following among car-crazy teenagers in Southern California. Today, the sport attracts tens of thousands of fans to its competitions both in Japan and the U.S. Some car makers even think the sport might lead to a resurgence of the small rear-wheel-drive cars the drifters prefer.
Drifting began in the early-1980s with a Japanese race-car driver named Keiichi Tsuchiya. Mr. Tsuchiya, who was in his 20s, started experimenting with drifting and practiced it on curvy roads deep in the mountains near his hometown. He says he was perfecting his ability to not spin out on curves in car races. And when he did start winning races, in 1983 and 1984, rivals took notice and copied his drifting moves.
Away from the circuits, Mr. Tsuchiya, known in Japan -- and now in California -- as "Dorikin," short for "Drift King," has promoted drifting, through instructional videos, as a good technique for sport-driving enthusiasts to avoid accidents by knowing how to bring cars out of skids. Enthusiasts say the sport is best practiced in safe areas, such as raceways -- not on the street. He organized drift contests, which came to be known as "Ikaten" -- "Cool Drift heaven."
Drifting heated up in the mid-1990s, with the help of a cartoon story called "Initial D." The story in a Japanese weekly comic book focused on a drifter named Takumi who honed his sliding skills on early-morning runs delivering tofu to a resort hotel in the mountains. The comic book continues to be enormously popular, spawning key chains, remote-control cars, T-shirts, lighters and dozens of CDs of music from the cartoon's techno soundtrack and even an animated movie.
Today, drifting in Japan has a three-year-old professional championship series called the D1 Grand Prix, which Mr. Tsuchiya helped to launch. Such contests pit drifters against one another in a format rather like that of figure skating in the Olympics. Each contender takes a turn performing various drift techniques, and a panel of judges evaluates each act on speed and grace. A typical D1 race draws 10,000 to 20,000 spectators. Mr. Tsuchiya, now 47, is earning $500,000 a year from drifting-related activities.
A drifter in action
Drifting crossed the Pacific over the past 10 years, helped by southern California's thriving Japanese expatriate community. Young Ken Gushi entered the drifting world at Gushi Auto Repair in San Gabriel, which is owned by his 36-year-old father, Tsukasa.
The lot is strewn with nearly 20-year-old Toyota Corolla GTS's and Nissan 240SX's in need of repairs and tuneups. These are the cars of choice among drifters, in part because they are cheap, rear-wheel-drive compacts -- a breed that has practically vanished from the American road.
Until recently, major U.S. auto makers were generally oblivious to drifting. But Jim Farley, chief of Toyota Motor Corp.'s new U.S. youth brand, Scion, sees in the sport a possible resurgence in small rear-wheel-drive cars, with better traction and smarter engines than the cars used to have. Rear-drive compact cars are easy to drift, but they went out of fashion in America years ago because front drive was more fuel efficient and afforded more space for passengers.
Ken Gushi learned to drive as a third-grader hanging out with his dad at the repair shop. He got hooked on drifting one Sunday three years ago when he accompanied his father to a dry lake in the Mojave Desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas to practice rally-driving techniques. Today he is considered one of the most gifted drifters in southern California.
A high-school senior, Mr. Gushi recently became one of the eight American drivers to qualify for the exhibition drift contest held during the D1 Grand Prix here in Irwindale the last day of August.
Thanks to his performance in qualifying rounds for the D1 show, he also landed a corporate sponsorship from Rotora, a performance-brake maker in City of Industry, Calif., and 13 other performance-parts makers. Loren Ho, senior vice president of Rotora, says the sponsorships, which pay for practice time, car parts, travel and lodging, should be valued at as much as $45,000 a year for each driver.
His road to the tournament wasn't all smooth. On Aug. 5 police cited Mr. Gushi for reckless driving and driving without a license after he drifted -- "briefly," he says -- on a street near Rotora's office. A passing police car stopped the teenager, issuing him a ticket and impounding the car.
A sold-out crowd of 10,000 hardcore fans showed up at the Irwindale Speedway tournament. In the parking lots, there were cars with Oregon, Illinois and even Florida license plates. During breaks in the contest, freestyle dirt bikes flew up and down ramps in the background. DJs spun underground hip-hop, teenage boys with T-shirts that read "Catch My Drift" and "Drift This" snapped pictures of the Japanese racing models. But when the race cars roared up again, spectators charged the grandstands to take their seats.
Mr. Gushi was in trouble before the race even started. In a morning practice, he misjudged a drift technique and brushed into a racing wall as he cornered his 1992 Nissan 240SX.
With three qualifying runs set to begin, Mr. Gushi traded his baseball cap for a race-car helmet. Accelerating around the first corner of the speedway on his first run, he broke into a good long sideways drift. But his second run was a disaster. He couldn't see where he was going. Smoke from burning tire tread was pouring into the car through the trunk, which had been cracked open during morning practice. Again, he initiated a wide drift but he couldn't keep it up as he finished the last of his turns. He failed to advance in the competition.
Even so, as he looked over his car in the pit, fans and family members were all over him with requests for autographs and pictures. High-school classmates popped up offering their congratulations. "Wow. I'm popular now," he said.
Write to Norihiko Shirouzu at
[email protected] and Sholnn Freeman at
[email protected]