How should I drift a Front Wheel Drive car like the Honda Civic?

Answer 1

You'd have to use the e-brake to start the drift. Search for videos on youtube.

Answer 2

You're never going to get the same tire-smoking rear-wheel drifts in a Civic that you will in a 240 (or an S2000, if you want to stay true to the Honda lineage :-). To really break the tires loose the way Yamada does, you need to spin the rear tires under power.

However, there's a lot you CAN do to get the back end to step out. I autocrossed a FWD car competitively about 10-15 years ago, and even in the limited-rules class I was running I was able to make the rear end step out under power.

The answer: Really stiff rear. The object is to resist roll at the rear, because this essentially moves weight off the inside rear tire. When the entire weight of the rear of the car is on the outside tire, it doesn't have enough contact patch to grip, and it will start to slide.

In my class, all I could do was run adjustable shocks and a stiffer FRONT anti-roll bar -- the wrong thing if you want to make the rear come out. So I let the front bar stock, but I'd run the front shocks on medium-stiff (important, because it keeps the inside wheel on the ground on corner exit) and the rears on full-stiff.

Now, for drifting, you can add a stiffer rear anti-roll bar -- get an adjustable one so you can tune it for different tracks. You can run stiffer rear springs too, or coil-overs. And finally, you can tune with tire pressures.

What I finally did, which worked really well for my GTI -- I tested the tires to get the optimum pressure (do you know the trick where you chalk the edge of the tread and see how much rubs off?). I set the front tires at the optimum pressure -- it was something like 36 PSI on those tires -- and then I upped the rear tire pressures to about 42 PSI.

This works -- although it's the opposite of the conventional wisdom -- because when you OVERinflate a tire, you reduce its grip just as surely as if you UNDERinflate it. But an overinflated tire has MUCH smoother breakaway, and is much safer -- an underinflated tire can pop out of the bead in extreme use (like, say, if you're SLIDING IT ACROSS THE TRACK :-).

Why it works -- an overinflated tire "crowns" a little, meaning the middle of the tread sticks out a little higher than the sidewalls. This reduces the size of your contact patch, so you have less grip available -- but the contact patch stays flat (doesn't roll onto the sidewalls), so it's predictable up to the limit. Smooth, fun to drive, and an absolute HOOT to pitch a GTI sideways at corner exit.

Oh -- and on reviewing the e-brake comments: take a rally school and learn the Swedish Flick. Yeah, it sounds like something you'd see in a dirty movie, but it was invented for FWD cars, to make the back end come around on super-tight corners. It's a scream in an AWD car (especially on gravel, mud or snow!!!), but the principle is the same:

Assume you're coming up to a right-hand turn. You're all the way at the left side of the track, but as you begin braking you aim diagonally, for the RIGHT (inside) edge of the track. About three carlengths before the point at which you'd begin turning down in a "classic" late-apex corner, you move the wheel to the LEFT -- away from the corner -- then you move it smoothly but quickly back to the right, towards the apex of the corner.

What this does is shift the weight from one side of the (stiff) rear end to the other as you're also shifting the weight forward onto the car's nose under braking. This unweights the inside-rear tire and the back starts coming around.

In a FWD (or AWD) car, you just keep your foot planted at the corner exit and the front wheels pull you out (while the rear ones spray gravel at the rally spectators :-).

It's very hard to visualize from a written description, so you may need to find someone who knows how to do it. But it'd be interesting to see if it gets your Civic to drift. Just don't try it out the first time someplace where there's a concrete wall on one side and a 200-foot drop on the other -- try it out somewhere that if you spin, you won't have to bring the car home in a collection of trash bags...

Answer 3

You can't drift a FWD car and if you do you'll look stupid. At best you can pull the E-brake and drag your rear tires around while looking like a complete and total jackass. What most people don't know about drifters is that the front tires are not able to turn freely. The brakes are applied ever so slightly to the front brakes only to provide drag this helps keep the rear tires spinning allowing them to spin and float, yet allows the front tires to turn and still be able to control direction of travel. once the rear end is floating you will be able to drift it back and forth with the steering wheel. you don't have to be going around a corner fast to drift. Its a simple matter of the rear of the car wanting to go faster than the front of a car

Answer 4

Find some snow or really wet slippery leaf covered road. Speed up, cut wheel, engage E-brake.

Answer 5

yea...using the ebrake will work good...have more controll since its frontwheel