It all began when a friend sent me an Instagram reel featuring a Drifting school located in Delhi. Called Bad Boi Drifts, the school showcased some of the most amazing tandem drift shots where two cars expertly drifted together in close proximity. And instantly, a long-dormant desire awakened within me. You see, for a petrolhead, the idea of drifting is as alluring as a siren’s call, irresistible and enchanting, inviting them into the world of controlled chaos and exhilarating precision. Besides, if you possess reasonably good car control, the thought that you can drift, provided that you have the right machine, is more or less inevitable. After all, India’s roads are teeming with budget front-wheel-drive cars, and drifting requires access to something a little more exotic (read as rear-wheel-drive).
So, a few messages and a few quick calls later, I was looking at the exciting prospect of a full day of drifting lessons within a few days.
What are Drifting Lessons?
While I would like to believe that drifting is as simple as flooring the pedal and giving the steering wheel a handful of opposite lock, there is more to the art of drifting – a lesson that I learnt later. Bad Boi Drifts offer two courses – Rookie and Semi-Pro. The former is a one-day event that teaches you to initiate and hold a drift, and the latter, an extension of the former, dedicates a second day focusing on drifting transitions. To make it easier, Day 1 or the Rookie session is all about learning how to perform the donut and figure-of-eight, whereas the Semi-Pro session or Day 2 hones your ability to transition from one turn to another around a short track.
At the time of writing this article, the Rookie course is priced at Rs 1.5 lakh,while the Semi-Pro course requires you to shell out Rs 2.25 lakh. The prices are all-inclusive, which means that they include every facet of your training experience – the car, instructor, track, and, most importantly, any damages you might cause to the training car. With that covered, let’s move on to the vehicle that is used to hone your drifting skills.
The Drift Mobile
Now, calling it the ‘Drift Mobile’may seem like an exaggeration, but the car that Bad Boi Drifts offers to its students is an old Mercedes-Benz C-Class. Which one? Let’s just say it has the word ‘KOMPRESSOR’ on its back. That should tell you what we are talking about. The model in question is technically the second-gen C-Class, which was in global production from 2000 to 2007. Today, it will be difficult to find one that is road-legal, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be ‘drift-legal’. Renowned for its robust reliability, finding one at a reasonable price is not that difficult. Moreover, the second-gen model,equipped with a 1.8-litre supercharged petrol engine,had a manual transmission, which means that there is no need to do an automatic to manual swap to get the car drift-ready.
Apart from all this, the team at Bad Boi Drifts add their own tweaks to the car to make it even better. For instance, the interior is stripped out to reduce the weight of the car. One of the drift cars (the black one) has most of its panels replaced by fibre. The supercharger is directly connected to the crank,which lets it achieve higher rpm and makes it more efficient. Plus, they also tune the engine differently, and they have added coil-overs, which lower the car and enhance its stiffness.
Now, what surprised me the most was their choice of tyres. Contrary to expectations, they do not use special drift tyres. Instead, they source regular road Hankook tyres in bulk. While you can install bucket seats, I found the regular seats of the C-Class more comfortable during my experience. This observation was possible because one of the training cars had bucket seats while another retained the regular seats.
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Floor It
That’s exactly what I did when I first got into the seat. And Mudit, the person who was going to make me a drifting god (just kidding), immediately asked me to stop. Our training began with a seemingly straightforward task – attempting a donut manoeuvre around a traffic cone. Remember the scene from Tokyo Drift when Han tells us why he drifts?Okay, it wasn’t anything as dramatic as that. In fact, it was downright challenging to perform one complete donut. Contrary to how professionals make it look so effortless, it’s anything but that.
For me, getting the throttle control right was easier than getting the steering movement right. You see, when you initiate a drift correctly, you are supposed to let the steering wheel go as it spins over to the other side and then just hold it there. This is the part where I was struggling – letting my wheel go. Years of road driving had ingrained the complete opposite instinct in me. After some time, I did manage to do a donut, but it was nowhere near the traffic cone. And I knew that it was going to be a long session. Next, I tried the figure-of-eight manoeuvre. This one was slightly easier as it didn’t involve spinning in the same spot, instead, it required you to spin out in two different spots. At least the view kept changing.The trick here was transitioning over from one side to the other,which meant a sharp twirl of the steering wheel to the opposite extreme. Honestly, I felt too overwhelmed on the first day, as would anyone. So, Mudit arranged for another session a couple of days later to give me the chance to get things right.
Finessing it
In the next session, we skipped the previous two exercises and went straight for the track layout. It was simple, there were three hairpins one after the other, followed by a long corner, which looped back to the first hairpin. I spun out a couple of times and then attempted to navigate the track using a racing line when Mudit stopped me again, and a sense of Deja vu hit me.
I was determined to get it right, and after a few laps, I started to successfully connect corners. While the hairpins proved to be quite challenging, I found the long corner to be my ally – I could bury the throttle and then easily hold the car sideways. Controlled chaos at last! The key, Mudit later told me, is seat time. The more familiar you are with the car, the better you get. As the age-old adage suggests, practice does indeed lead to perfection.
Day 2 ended with a subtle smile on my face and a desire in my heart to find an old C-Class and make it my own personal ‘Drift Mobile’. Time to plan a heist, I guess. Jokes aside, if you have the necessary resources (time, money and, most importantly, patience), drifting is like an automotive ballet, and the satisfaction of nailing a drift is simply unparalleled. So, I suggest you break those Mutual Funds and go smoke some tyres.
Pictures by: Shashwath MM
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