Drifting, a new wave of extreme racing, is the rage 

	Skidding around sharp corners at high speeds has become a sport for many young adults looking for a thrill. Robert Beck/SI

By Karl Taro Greenfeld, SI.com

There are so many reasons to hate on Billy Boy, but you could start with that Web page where he describes his racing crew, the Analog Assassins, as "die hard, party f------ animals. when we are not on the road, we are at concerts, or clubs, or parties, or fashion shows. we are elite. we are computer nerds, we are rockstars, we are DJs, we are fashionistas, we are born to win. so come win with us...."

Mark Aldaba, 21, reads aloud as he scrolls down the Web site. When he reaches the word "fashionistas," his hand springs from his mouse, as if he is too disgusted to maintain even a fiber-optic link with the Analog Assassins.

"I don't know why," Mark shakes his head, "but when I read his stuff, it just gets to me."

Mark is squat, about 5-foot-6, with muscular legs, a thick chest and upper arms well rippled from break dancing and tuning his 1991 Nissan 240SX, known, in the import tuning world of Southern California, by its chassis code of S13. (To a participant in Southern California's teen and twenty-something car culture, calling an S13 by its model name -- 240SX -- would be like calling what a baseball pitcher stands on a pile of dirt.) Mark was a sprinter at Bishop Alemany High in Mission Hills, and still possesses the easygoing physicality of a good athlete just entering his prime. Only Mark doesn't run anymore, and rarely plays volleyball and football. He now spends almost all of his time tuning and drifting his S13.

Though he still has a pair of twin direct drive Technics 1200s and a Vertex mixer, Mark says he seldom DJs at parties anymore, either. Spinning just seems so 2002, and if you want to be at the center of youth culture today, you want to do what Mark does, and that's getting sideways in his car as a participant in the motor sport of drifting.

A New Phenomenon

Drifting is the sport -- or art -- of controlling a car when it is doing what it is engineered not to do. Drifting is about taking curves, often on very dangerous mountain roads at very high speeds, by sliding or skidding through them. A drifter tries to link these skids and slides together, fishtailing by various combinations of acceleration, hard steering, braking and shifting.

Slides are avoided in almost every motor sport, and cars are designed to maximize traction and control on turns. When a car is slipping sideways, that usually means the driver has lost control. If you've ever been in a car as it's sliding around a corner, the feeling is sickening. And if you've been the driver of such a vehicle, the natural impulse, if you aren't frozen by panic, is to do whatever you can to get the car to stop sliding, usually by turning the steering wheel into the direction of the slide. Another response is to steer opposite the slide, causing the condition known among drifters as "oversteering" and among others as "donuts."

There are several ways to initiate a drift, the most basic being to accelerate hard and than yank the emergency brake. Most difficult is a pure drift that comes from plenty of horsepower and hard steering; such a maneuver will keep the car's weight distributed more evenly and allow for the drifter to control his slide so that just as he has reached the apex of a curve he can accelerate out of it -- and into his next slide. The art is in mastering the delicate physics of torque, sway and balance to string together perfect lines through a course or canyon run, and having the courage to stay with a drift even when it seems like you are about to hit a guardrail or the wall of a track.

Riding with a drifter is like taking those split seconds before a car accident and extending them over a four-mile run. Your weight is repeatedly slammed from side to side as the vehicle careens at high speeds while the driver's feet and hands are in constant motion as he shifts, clutches, brakes and steers through thick clouds of clutch and tire smoke. If the window is open, bits of rubber and road will bounce off your face.

When a drifter crashes, there is no time to be frightened because the guardrail comes on you too fast. Knees bounce off dashboards, heads pop forward and you thank God for your harness belt. "Impact sucks," says drifter Andrew Hateley, "but it is better than going off the cliff."