Option — Shōwa Car Tuning & Buyers Guide (2000 Edition)

Back then, no one expected the music show “Ika-ten” to become such a hit, and no one expected the drift event of the same name to grow this much either. In the early days the level was low: the question was simply whether a driver could drift at all. Keiichi Tsuchiya, the chief judge, was the only one who could drift perfectly. Contestants listened intently to Dorikin and tried to improve their skills. Video readers listened to his drift lessons too. Video Option’s Ika-ten segment was not yet about “watching a drift competition”; it taught “how to drift.” Readers studied and practiced with the videos, then made a big leap a few years later. The first event featured a surprisingly varied field by today’s standards: an EP7, an O-series Corolla (FR), a 175A Lancer Turbo, and more. Looking back today, that event… [text continues beyond this region].

The competitors gradually improved. Early FF cars disappeared, and the Hachiroku, GX8, and AA3 Carina began to become the norm. Yet tuning was still mostly about overpowering the car with suspension, a muffler, and a locked differential. Vehicle-specific LSD kits were not yet widely available, and unlike today there was no factory viscous unit that made it relatively easy to imitate a drift. Even so, many enthusiasts chose a locked diff simply because it let them drift.

In July 1991, the first national event was held. Drift technique and car preparation were still developing; the main methods were shift-lock and handbrake drift. Shift-lock breaks rear traction by dropping a gear and engaging it abruptly without matching engine speed. Handbrake drift uses the parking brake to transfer weight, break rear traction, and initiate a slide. From handbrake drift came the technique that astonished everyone: a long handbrake drift, known as “direct drift.” With its arrival, drifting began moving toward motorsport as a spectacle. Dorikin’s earlier drifting had been a by-product of driving fast; direct drift made little sense as a way to set a lap time. It wears tires and sheds speed dramatically before corner entry. But that is precisely why spectators cheer: driver and crowd share the excitement, making it a thrilling motorsport. At the first national event, judges scored the distance of the direct drift—who could hold the slide the longest before entering the corner? The winner was Drift Ensemble’s Masaki Watanabe, known as “Debu-nabe.” His Yamanashi crew brought this new direct-drift movement into drifting… [text continues].