You probably think a comparison like this should have an obvious conclusion. A car set up to generate rib-smashing g-forces is bound to be faster around a road course than a car designed to steer with the rear. But stop and think about it. The showboating slides implemented in drifting are sometimes the fastest way around corners in timed events such as rally racing. And the same horsepower that hangs drift cars sideways sends them charging down the straightaway with a vengeance. Given the right course, couldn't drifting show itself as a skill that's useful for more than just pleasing crowds and wooing judges?
Even if it could, finding a road course that can potentially validate sideways shenanigans before the stopwatches of SCC is near impossible. If we simply staged the shootout on a big track with a bevy of long, sweeping corners, like Willow Springs, the grip-biased car would walk away laughing. On the other hand, if the challenge took place on a rough-and-tumble rally section, the drift car... well, neither car would walk out of it at all.
The Course
We're going to attempt to build a level playing field. Peppered with long sweepers and hairpin turns tight enough to make a go-kart racer clench his butt cheeks, the test course can, we hope, be run in under 50 seconds. That's right, we're timing a drift car. We realize there are reasons why drifting isn't timed, but the only way we know how to declare a victor is with a timing system and sector times, not style points and tire smoke.
In print, our little track looks like quite the road course. Don't let the graphics fool you. In reality, it's diminutive-a little over 700 feet long and just 300 feet wide. It's divided into nine sections, four are relatively straight, the remaining five have anything from wide to ridiculously tight corners.
The Cars
Our small but varied track should offer each driving style an equal chance of victory. Now we just need to pick one car that offers two different driving styles the same odds of winning. If there's a car sold in America as praised for its ability to go sideways as for its road-course competence, it's the Subaru WRX. In a little more than two decades, it has amassed countless rally victories and become a cult favorite among road-course rats around the world.
Stock
If we're going to test a WRX, it's going to be an STI. We're using a brand-spankin' new 2007 STI Limited as a baseline. In Urban Grey Metallic with a tiny deck lid lip spoiler and black Brembo brakes, the stock car looks like a sinister sleeper.
All this makes hauling ass that much more fun. Only a trained eye can pick the Limited out as something that can break laws and liquefy licenses, and nobody sees it coming. Like any other STI, it's rocket-ship quick and hangs on to canyon corners hard enough to spit asphalt into the wheel wells.
The fastest way around the test course in the stock car should be with the Driver Controlled Center Differential (DCCD) set all the way to the rear. But with it set to auto, we realize our fastest times-more than a second faster than we were able to achieve with the diff locked at a 40:60 front/rear split.