Many attribute the return of drifting as a competitive sport to mountain-road racers of rural Japan. Informal challenges on back mountain roads eventually evolved into a heavily funded and advertised competitive events, sanctioned by organizations and held on private tracks.
Drifting started out as a racing technique popular in the All Japan Touring Car Championship races over 30 years ago. A motorcycling legend turned driver named Kunimitsu Takahashi was the foremost practitioner of drifting techniques in the 1970's. Takahashi's aggressive drifting skills — he was famous for hitting the apex (the point where the car is closest to the inside of a turn) at high speed and then drifting through the corner, preserving a high rate of speed — earned him several championships and a legion of fans who enjoyed the spectacle of burning tires and perilous speed.
A street racer named Keiichi Tsuchiya became particularly enthralled by Takahashi's drift techniques. Tsuchiya began practicing his drifting skills on the streets, and quickly gained a reputation amongst the "hashiriya" or racing crowd. In 1977, several popular car magazines and tuning garages conspired to produce a video of Tsuchiya's drifting skills on windy mountain roads. The video, called Pluspy, became a cult hit and inspired many of the professional drifting drivers on the circuits today. Tsuchiya earned himself the nickname "Dorikin," which means Drift King in Japanese. In 1977 Keiichi began his racing career driving many different cars in amateur racing series events. Racing these underpowered cars was difficult but again a great learning experience. Later Keiichi was picked up to drive the ADVAN sponsored Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno. During many races on a downhill corner he would drift the car and carry a better corner speed than his competitors. This technique is what made him the Drift King, not, as most believe, that he was first in the drift scene. In 1988, alongside Option magazine founder Daijiro Inada, he would help to organise one of the first drift events, the event was a sucess despite very few drivers were capable of drifting then.
Drifting "officially" began in the United States in 1996 with an event at Willow Springs racetrack in California hosted by the magazine Option, but it did not become popular until around 2002, and has since exploded into a massively popular form of motorsport. Japanese drifters are still considered to be at the cutting edge of technique and car development, but their American counterparts are quickly catching up. Many American enthusiasts consider drifting to be an extension of American motorsports such as dirt track racing, however "drifting" in its modern form as a sport unto itself is of Japanese origin.
Many of the techniques used today in drifting were developed by rally drivers competing on dirt, gravel and snow. On such surfaces, the fastest way to take a corner is generally by sliding.
