AWD drifting

a controlled drift on dry pavement in a awd, is it posible? in wet weather it's really easy to pull the back end out and get all 4 going but on the pavement the car just skips(not cool), i have seen videos of evo's doing it, anyone have any tips?

Of course it can be done, but you might need to tune your suspension for a little more oversteer.

Plain and simple, go faster.

You've got an AWD car, it's very hard to cause those to break lose on dry asphalt. So, you can either rig up some sort of hose type device to the nose of your car connected to a water tank in the trunk to spray water on the road in front of you to make it nice and slippery, or you can speed up a bit.

NOTE: be VERY careful with this. Raise your speed in very small incremnets, like maybe 5 km/h each run. And you realy shouldn't be doing this anywhere besides a closed off empty road or parking lot. Too many amature people(no offense to you) try stuff like this without actually knoing what they are at and it can be very dangerous, so be careful. Oh yeah, you could also use the hand brake to break the ass end loose but thats the pussy way :)

Oh yeah, and jsut so you know, drifting is not a way to make your driving faster. It slows you down. Especially in a superb AWD vehicle like a WRX. You'd be much faster just learning to brake and follow the line properly then trying to drift. Drifting makes you slower, always.(at least on dry pavement.)

This this the sorta drifting your looking for?

http://students.washington.edu/crm2/Racing%20Videos/Evo%20Drift.mpeg

think tighting up the rear by adding a nice stiff rear strut and having nothing in the front would help?? yeah i know, difting would not be the quickest way to take a turn n most stituations. sepecaially with AWD, but it is fun. looks like the guy in the video turned one way and the another really sharply to breake loose. thats crazy how he's waving to people while he's doing it!

Waving isn't that hard. Once you get a really long drift like that started you only need one arm to hold the wheel. Plus they have years of experience :)

yes once you have initiated a drift..you loose traction and you begin to skid in the direction you intended on going. you can just use one arm to hold the wheel so the car dosent go to far and spin out. Then when you wana regain control drop gears..thats what i usually do. It seems to be alot faster for me than breaking and following the line..since once you regain control your exit speed will increase. If i wanted to i can wave or take a sip of coffee ...because you really dont need much effort to take full control of a car that already has lost traction...

Oh, driving grip is MUCH faster. Every bit of noise you hear fromt eh wheels sliding, thats lost speed. Every bt of smoke from the wheels, thats lost speed. Basically drifting is the creation of unnecessary friction, which is never good.

really? i own a RWD car..so i cant compair the speed..i hear that alot too that grip is way faster. You could be right....but who am i to argue with you, i just drift to lessen my course times. :)

Grip style is not always faster. The thing that matters is exit speed. When driving grip style, you slow down for the corner, and take the proper line, accellerating past the apex. This will give you the fastest exit speed most of the time, because you get the power down earlier and get a faster run at the straigtaway, which really speeds up laps.

However, when the straightaways are very short, and there is not much extra time to be taken off, drifting may indeed be faster. Since you carry a lot more speed into the corner, sometimes, you can get a little lower exit speed, but the total amount of time was shorter for the drift.

On really loose surfaces like dirt, ice or gravel, drifting is usually the fastest way, because you just can't put down the power like you could on the road, and for the same reason(lack of traction), you burn off a lot less speed when drifting.

As for an AWD vehicle, try soft shocks on the front, stiff on the rear. This should make your Scooby a little more tailhappy

i have a wagon, which is an extra 80 pounds behind the rear axle, and i have a sound system, which is more weight, and if i put a lot of air pressure in my rear tires and lower the front down enough to get good traction, it will *kinda* drift on dry pavement. it looks like little, weeny drifts, but it does it.



p.s.-the tire-pressure game is fun in the wet

faint + handbrake and pray :D yea go to some rally website they might be able to help alittle more i know the WRX has dry stages and they drift on that well its not really drift its more like the WAY..........

Does the WRX have shocks or struts on the back? Just go to a harder strut/shock...

Drifting with an AWD car is based primarily on intertia and entry speed. While each car has slightly different approaches (WRX's for instance are different then an EVO or an STi) the basis is still the same. In order to overcome the grip that the AWD systems have, a higher entry speed is required. Basically keep it floored and get some balls because thats what it is going to take to get an AWD car to drift like some Intial D stuff lol. As you approach the turn your speed must be high so that when you initiate the drift, you can use hard steering inputs, a combination of heel and toe downshifts, and then partial throttle usage to initiate some oversteer, from there you need to maintain a fair amount of throttle control and speed, so that the grip of the AWD system is consistantly lessend and the car is allowed to slide more naturally. A "Scandanavian Flick" is where you would jink the car to the opposite side of the turn and then flick it back towards the turn causing a much more aggresive slide in and drift action. Unfortunately this is harder to do with the WRX due to its super sensitive ABS system, when the car is flicked away from the turn you generally apply the brakes hard to lock them up, breaking traction, so when you flick it through the turn, you are already sliding. With ABS you can end up just shooting straight foward in the direction of the first flick. Depending on the situation the brakes are not always used in a flick, for instance in a rally, its rarely needed becasue the low traction surface allows the intial slip. Grip driving is GENERALLY faster in a race circut. However, a well executed drift can turn faster lap times and faster corners. In grip driving you break to follow the line and use corner exit acceleration to move as quickly as possible through the turn. The obvious disadvantage of this is the need to slow for the turn, and then accelerate out. In the ideal, and techically correct, drift, especially a 4wheel drift (not to be confused with an AWD drift or 4WD drift) the entry speed is easily .5 times higher than a grip driver's entry speed, and as the car is slid through the turn, the goal isnt to be sideways so much as to have the whole car aligned with the corner exit line. In this way you have maintained a higher entry speed, and are already set to use full foward traction and accelearation.

I've also heard that countersteering in an AWD car is writing a deathwish. Is that true? I mean I guess it makes sense because if you turn the wheel in an AWD it might want to bolt in the direction you're turning....

yeah basically. Think of the Lan-Evo corps, they dont use counter-steering to accomplish an AWD drift, they use the vehicle's momentum, and then hard directional steering, its the same way for my WRX, if I want it to 4 wheel drift, you have to blitz the corner with an entry speed easily 10mph higher than a RWD car, and then use hard steering in the direction you want the rear to move in. Its not as pretty as a FR drift, but its just as fast, and offers higher exit acceleration. Counter-steering can be used to correct a large amount of oversteer, or correct the drift angle, but it should never be as extreme as a FR's. In general, AWD drifting looks more like the car just sliding off its original entry line, like it slowly deviates from a normal line. The exit is the important part: just like the ideal FR drift line, the car should be pointing the same direction as the course or road, and able to use full exit acceleration from that point.
One of the big issues is getting past an AWD car's inherint tendancy to understeer. One way is to use a bigger rear roll bar diameter, and push the under/over bias more towards neutral or oversteer. This results in an easy to turn car, or even a inner rear wheel lifting car, but can compromise the stability and cause excessive counter steering effort. Ideally, for me, I prefer mostly neutral with a touch of understeer. They talk about understeering being a benifit in Initial D, which is basically true. Rather than fighting the under, you can use it to maintain a higher average speed. AWD cars do this naturally, but you have to push them harder in the steering to keep them at the right angle.