Project Nissan Silvia Drifting - Flickitto

It's surprising every time you don't hear a thud.

The sound of a car pirouetting out of control is the same on the infield of Irwindale Speedway as it is on the street, and you don't have to be watching the D1 Driver Search to know when something has gone wrong.

Do it right, and it's the sound of two tires howling in unison, starting with the high pitch of high speed, slowly deepening as the car approaches the apex, then disappearing behind a wall of exhaust growl as horsepower, counter-steer and talent converge to form glory.

Mix the first two without enough of the third, however, and you get the confused wail of all four tires changing speed and direction in a desperate spiral toward the wall. Throw in the strained grumble of an engine off the cam, off boost, or otherwise bogged out of the powerband, and there's nothing left to do but brace for the impact.

Then the thud.

You learn the drifting soundtrack well when you spend most of your time out of view, cowering in whatever patch of shade you can find, sucking Gatorade and choking down greasy Louisiana sausages. You get a lot of shade-and-sausage time when you get eliminated in the first round. You get eliminated in the first round when you don't bring all the ingredients of glory to the contest. It takes more than horsepower, countersteer, and talent. I brought those. Turns out you also have to pack your balls.

It takes big, hairy, swingin' balls to take your beloved drift machine, drive it toward a wall at 60 mph, and flick it sideways toward the concrete.

But that's the game. Turn One is a big, slightly banked corner lined with the great immovable. Glory and a good score means flicking it left in front of an orange cone sitting alone in the middle of Irwindale's front straight. Then, in what rally drivers call a Scandinavian flick, and animated Japanese backroad hooligans call an inertia drift, you flick it back to the right (toward the wall) and finally, assuming you're still in control, flick it back to the left. From here, it's horsepower, inertia, timing, setup, calm, and technique.

The better you are, the closer to the wall you get with the rear bumper. But don't hang by the wall too long, you still have to bring the car down the banking, still sideways, and hit the apex as fast and as sideways as possible, maintaining control as the car transitions onto the flat ground of the infield.

Again, maximum glory points for getting close to the inside wall, and carrying the slide halfway to the next corner. Then you do it all to the right, and again to the left, before you get in line for your next shot.

Only the first turn has a wall, and after watching more than half of the 29 cars before me do the flick-flick-spin-pucker routine, I decided I would avoid the humiliation, disappointment and abject terror of backing it into the wall. Project Silvia has lots of power and lots of grip, so I would drive into the first corner clean, build up lots of cornering force, and throw down the boost. Tires would spin, my car would slide, and I could swing through all three turns in one smooth, glorious ribbon of tire smoke.

That actually happened in two of the six practice passes. In the other four, I spun. Turns out Scandinavian flicks, grippy asphalt, and 277,000-mile rear subframe bushings make for a car that transitions from one slide to another with an unexpected and unpredictable suddenness. Maybe the subframe spacers I ordered to lock out the sloppy old bushings would have helped, but they were delivered to the wrong office and I never saw them. On the other hand, maybe subframe spacers are a poor substitute for balls.

The first elimination round was scored as the best of three passes through the course. If you're a drift fan, you know the scoring is done like freestyle motocross or snowboarding. If you think drifting is stupid, the scoring is just like figure skating. Either way, it's the subjective opinion of a panel of judges sitting on the sidelines. Please the judges and you'll do fine. Thirty seconds before round 1, I hear the judges will think I'm a sissy for cleverly avoiding the impact. If I wanted a passing score, I would have to flick it to the wall.

Project Silvia is massively powerful and resolutely rear-drive. It can hold onto a slide for days. Even with an open differential, many a Silvia test session has ended with glorious doughnuts, 200-feet in diameter, as I did powerslides around the skidpad until the tires blistered. But there are still bugs to be worked out. There's still a vagueness to the rear end, less steering feedback than I would like, and a sloppiness to the seating. That makes initiating a slide in narrow confines difficult, and a successful Scandinavian anything nearly impossible.