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Published on 21 March 2018

No Bentley, any good racing driver would be drifting at higher speed corners. One of the problems with many of todays race tracks, particularly street tracks is their stop start nature, with really slow corners. You can only drift a car at higher speeds, over about 80 MILES per hour. The Lotus 20 gives a good example of the difference in performance when the driver is capable of a controlled drift. We had quite a few 20s in Oz, & a large number of people tried to use them as a step up from sports car or touring car racing in the 60s. I saw the records of about 45 drivers who drove them at Warwick Farm. The 20 was very quick for a 100 BHP car weighing just 900 pounds fully wet, with 400 X 15 tyres, however they were also quite vicious if you got it wrong. 100 BHP is also very marginal power to hold a drift. Most of those drivers, who had been quick in their sports or touring cars, got down to 1. 52 at the Farm, that was the best you could do without drifting. Quite a few crashed trying to go any quicker. However, if you could hold a drift through the faster corners, Ledger, Paddock, & Homestead into Hume straight, you would immediately jump down to 1.47. Yes a whole 5 seconds, & that achieved in just 3 long fast corners. The better of the 1.52 brigade could hold the faster drivers from creek to the causeway, right up through the esses, but not quite through the right hander from the northern crossing to the causeway. From memory, Leo, Glen Scott, Clive Nolan, Stillwell, someone else & me got to that magic number or to 1,46. That was it for the car with a 105E Ford Cosworth, & those 4" wheels. There was not much sense modifying them' or adding more power as they just didn't respond to it. Across the top at Bathurst is another area where drifting would see you pull out a hundred yards or more very easily, on someone who could not control a drift with power. Drifting the car is not sliding, you don't leave black marks on the track, although it is hard on tyres. The car appears to be cornering on rails from a distance, but is walking a little wider than you are steering it. You could only hold the rear end with power, you needed throttle from turn in all the way through the corner, thus you don't see trail braking in the open wheelers of the era. The 20 needed almost full throttle to hold the back in, my more powerful F2 Brabham about half throttle, where the F1 it was less than quarter throttle to hold her. You could take more liberties with the F1, easing throttle to tighten your line & adding more to open it up. You could never do that with the lotus, as once you let the tail out even a little, it did not have the power to bring it back. The photo is the Lotus in Paddock, out of pit straight at the Farm. You can see by the horrible angle of the back wheel, that the chassis was at about it's limit, the reason they got visious when you screwed up.