Skid Marks and Smiles: My Spontaneous Trip to Drift School

I’ve been a car guy for most of my life. Over the past couple of decades, I’ve spent plenty of time carving through canyons, attending more car events than I can count, and participating in a variety of motorsports — from drag racing to HPDEs, autocross, time trials, and even a bit of ice racing up at Georgetown Lake.

You know what I hadn’t done until recently? Drifting. Well, at least not intentionally — unless you count a few overzealous moments that sent me more sideways than I originally planned.

So when a good friend suggested we go to drifting school, I didn’t exactly require an aggressive sales pitch. His entire argument was, “Want to go to drifting school?” and my rebuttal was, “I’ll grab my helmet.” I’ve been to a few performance driving schools over the years, but until my friend brought it up, I had no idea drifting school was even a thing — much less that there was one right here in Colorado, barely an hour from my house.

We ended up signing up with Colorado Drifting School, which operates out of a small go-kart track in Dacono. They offer a few different car options for students: their entry-level rides are Nissan 350Zs, but if you’re feeling bold (or just want to make a lot more noise and smoke), they also have V8-powered Mustangs available.

Given that neither of us had ever intentionally driven sideways before, we decided to play it safe and stick with the Z-cars — you know, before working our way up to “Mustang leaving Cars and Coffee” levels of chaos. I’m just going to come right out and say it: out of everything I’ve ever done in motorsports, drifting was completely counterintuitive. On a track or autocross course, when a RWD car starts to hang the tail out, my instinct is to lift, countersteer, gather it up, and get back on line before easing back into the throttle. As it turns out, that instinct doesn’t help much when your entire goal is to keep the car sideways.

It took me a few sessions to rewire my brain — to give a small, quick turn-in while going full throttle to kick the rear loose, and then not immediately panic-lift once it started sliding. The trick was to stay in it and let the car steer itself, which feels about as unnatural as petting a cat backwards.

So many of the habits I’ve built from years of performance driving actually worked against me here. On a track, I’m used to making sharp turn-ins and small steering corrections to fine-tune my line. In drifting, that just confuses the car. I was giving way too much steering input and not nearly enough throttle. Apparently, the magic formula is about a quarter turn of the wheel and a heavy right foot. Anything more and you’re just along for the ride… in the wrong direction. The tricky part — aside from completely rewiring everything my brain knows about driving — was getting the countersteer timing and pace right. Once the slide is initiated, countersteer is mandatory, but if you don’t unwind the wheel at just the right moment, you’ll find yourself gracefully (or not so gracefully) backing off the track.

It took me a couple of sessions to finally trust the process enough to just let go of the steering wheel and allow the car to unwind itself naturally. Once again, this went against every instinct I’ve built from years of performance driving… but man, was it ridiculously fun! I lost count of how many times I went off the track backward — let’s just say it happened multiple times per session. My in-car instructor was incredibly patient with my ham-fisted buffoonery, offering feedback after nearly every corner. He’d calmly point out when I lifted off the throttle too early, didn’t give it enough to begin with, turned in too much, countersteered too late, or failed to ease up while countersteering. Basically, if there was a way to mess it up, I found it.

Without an instructor, I would’ve had absolutely no idea what I was doing wrong. I was genuinely impressed by his mix of knowledge, patience, and psychic-level ability to know exactly what I did wrong every time we looped it or didn’t get the car quite sideways enough. While I’m still a long way from being an actual drifter, I could feel real progress from my first session to my last — all thanks to the constant feedback from my instructor riding shotgun. Without his steady stream of corrections, I wouldn’t have had the foggiest idea why I kept getting things wrong or what to do differently.

By the final session, there were even a few times that I started calling out my own mistakes mid-slide, as if my slow brain was finally beginning to “click.” Drifting is absolutely a skill — one you can’t think your way through in real time, or at least I can't! It’s semingly all about muscle memory, repetition, and trusting the process. So even though I'm still a total novice, it was still cool to see how much improvement came just from a few sessions of hands-on instruction.

Another awesome part of the experience was that during our sessions, it was just the two cars out on a small go-kart track — nothing and no one to hit. Translation? You can throw the car sideways with reckless abandon, without worrying about hurting the car, the facility, or anything else, other than your own fragile ego. What really blew me away were the demonstrations the instructors gave at the start of the class. Riding shotgun with guys who actually know what they’re doing is something else entirely. After walking us through the course and explaining the basics of drifting technique, they jumped right into tandem runs — sliding within just a few feet of each other, linking every corner (and even the straights) like it was no big deal.

I couldn’t decide whether to laugh hysterically at the sheer insanity of it or hang on to the 350Z’s door handle for dear life, so I chose to do both, simultaneously. I’ve never been in a car that was continuously sideways while another car was doing the exact same thing just a few feet away.

I grew up watching Initial D for hours on end, but seeing it unfold in real life — from the passenger seat — is an entirely different experience. It’s one I’ll never forget. So, the big question: did I enjoy drifting school? Absolutely — without a doubt. Would I recommend it to my fellow gearheads? 100 percent. While it’s not exactly cheap, when you factor in that the school provides the car, the instructors, and — most importantly — the tires, I actually thought it was a fantastic value.

Am I planning on buying a drift car, or setting up my 128i for sideways antics? Probably not. It was a fun experience and an awesome skill to try, but in my heart, I’m still more at home playing the grip game on a race track or canyon road. That said, if I ever stop procrastinating and finally pick up a sim rig, I could absolutely see myself pitching a digital car sideways for fun. Who knows — given my tendency to swap cars and mods like some people change socks, I might even change my mind one day and start talking about welded diffs and hydraulic handbrakes.

All in all, it was a fantastic experience — one I’d recommend to anyone curious about the mystic art of going sideways and grinning the whole time.