IT'S a truism of racing: A squealing tire is a happy tire.
In which case, Vaughn Gittin Jr.'s tires are positively giddy as the 25-year-old part-time IT manager and full-time throttle monkey slides his 700-horsepower Mustang around one of Irwindale Speedway's low banked turns. And not just a minor slide, either, no NASCAR "she's a little loose in the corner" slide, but a huge, obscene, major-malfunction, beg-for-mercy power slide that makes his four Falken tires smoke like a Haitian roadblock.
Behind the car a layer of fog worthy of the old DDT mosquito trucks hangs over the asphalt. We are well and truly sideways at 90 mph. I am in the passenger seat, hanging onto a piece of roll cage -- which is to say, in the parlance of racing, I've got ahold of the Jesus handle.
In any other motor sport, such a slide would end rather noisily against a wall, after which there would commence an impromptu sale of used car parts. But this is the Japanese motor sport of drifting, in which racers are judged on the speed, accuracy, daring and balletic grace of their driving as they slide sideways -- drift -- around a serpentine course.
An expert in controlled chaos, Gittin spins the wheel in the other direction and pumps the clutch. The car's rear end pitches around violently and now, instead of looking out the right side window, I'm looking out the left, and the car, fully crossed up and filling with tire smoke, arcs around an orange traffic cone -- a corner "apex."
This is just a practice session for Gittin and team Falken, a warm-up for this weekend's D1 Grand Prix drifting event at Irwindale. But, Gittin says, "I like to go big all the time."
Uh-huh. Can I get out now?
Drifting gets 'Fast and Furious'
Never heard of drifting? Well, that's about to change. Coming in June to a mondo-plex near you is "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," the third installment of the car-porn franchise that first brought us the thespian exploits of Vin Diesel in 2001. This time, the story involves a young American hot rodder who gets in trouble with the law, flees to Japan and -- behind the wheel of his father's '69 Mustang fastback with a turbocharged Nissan motor in the snout -- eventually confronts the evil, \o7yakuza\f7-connected "Drift King" in a cliff-hanging race up a mountain road, the climactic "race of death."
I kid you not.
