CLEAN BANDIT
Drift cars wear battle scars well. All race and competition cars do, really – but few carry off an aura of slight dishevelment with quite the carefree aplomb of those that have been specifically engineered to go sideways. While the nature of point-scoring in the sport encourages balletic grace and precision of movement, the fact that you’re hurtling at oblique angles and improbable speeds with a total disregard for tyre longevity means that, by simple consequence, the chances of hitting something are quite high; the point of drifting is to constantly be almost out of control. That’s why these machines often look best when slightly beaten up. It proves that their helmsmen have been trying.
What we’re looking at in broad terms, then, is a wilful and celebratory disregard for purity. The antithesis to the concours scene, in which every bolthead must be artfully aligned and every part must boast the correct serial numbers with drifting, fit-for-purpose is key, and this taster-menu approach has spawned a glorious mongrel scene over the generations – cars with mucked about chassis and fibreglass aero addenda stitched together with cable ties. However, sometimes there
