I have no more of a problem with drifting as I do with say, freestyle snowboarding events. You can race a snowboard down a hill, or you can do tricks with it. You can race a car around a track (just so ya know Im@ge, qtiger is referring to drifting from the perspective of a road racer), or you can do tricks with a car. As long as people understand that it's doing tricks with a car and it's judged subjectively, fine by me.

The problem I have with drifting is that when people actually think that's the way you get around a track, or the way to properly set up a car for performance handling. It's not. It's how you do tricks, and set up a car to do tricks. Tricks do not equal fast. In Japan at least, people understand that drifting and road racing are two distinct ways of driving and setting up a car. Road racing is for going fast, drifting is for having fun. No problem.

Here in America we're so obsessed with the car show concept and the image of performance that drifting gets confounded as an actual measure of the performance of the car, just because it happens to be driving instead of sitting on a carpet. It's trick driving. Nothing more, nothing less.