Rear Toe
This is a subject that has a lot of misconceptions, as many people try to tune how the car is balanced in drift by adjusting the rear toe. You shouldn’t run too much rear toe-in on a drift car. By doing so, you’ll have a car that will straighten up if the throttle is lifted or modulated. This is the leading cause of serious drift car crashes. A car’s understeer/oversteer balance should always be adjusted in the suspension, not by using the toe. If you want the car looser, with more oversteer, increase the rear bar stiffness and/or rear spring rate and stiffen the rear shock. If you want to tighten up the car, with less oversteer, run softer rear bar, spring and shock.
Run a little toe in — usually, you want to run about 1/8-inch. Cars with semi-trailing arm rear suspensions like BMW E30s, Nissan Z31s and S12s can run more like ¼-inch toe in, as these cars will toe out under roll. If you’re having trouble making angle in high-speed turns, run zero rear toe, but never run rear toe out — that will make your car very twitchy.
Increased Steering Angle Mods
A lot of people also modify the steering for more angle. This gives you more countersteer and helps prevent you from spinning out. Typically, this involves putting a spacer between the inner tie rod joint and the steering rack; it’s an OK thing to do, but be aware it also might increase bumpsteer slightly.
S-chassis guys have options: you can purchase excellent knuckles on the market — we like the Hariguchi S-chassis knuckle because it gives a lot more angle while preserving the critical steering geometry. If you modify your knuckle, be aware about increasing bumpsteer and do your best to keep the steering pickup points on the same plane as stock.
Tire Pressure
Tire pressure has a huge effect on how a drift car handles. For neutral balance, if you’ve generally followed our guidelines, you want to run near or close to 32 psi hot all around — this is your stable temperature after a few runs. You want to start with your cold temps a few psi below this and will probably have to bleed pressure after every run. Once you get some experience, you’ll more or less know about what cold pressure to start with.
The best tire pressure will vary, depending on the car, the type of tire, the rim width and a bunch of other factors, but this will be a good starting point. If you have a low-powered car with a stock engine, you can pump up your rear tire pressures as high as 50 psi to help keep the car sideways. If you rock a big-turbo car or a V-8, you can run as low as the low 20s to help with forward bite, although super-low tires pressure are best left to the pros, as it can make the car twitchier and the tire could debead with a sudden loss of tire pressure.
These are the basics of drift car chassis setup — do this right and you’ll be ahead of the game. When you move up to Pro-Am, are starting to do some serious tandem drifting or are getting into the pro levels, there are many other tricks that can be put to use, but they’re quite a bit more technical. We’ll cover these later.
Remember to have fun, don’t be afraid to experiment to find what is best for you and don’t practice on the street!