The NZ Drift Series is a five-round motorsport series organised by Parkside Media, publisher of NZ Performance Car magazine. Competing against D1NZ it has achieved greater success because of NZ Performance Car and NZ Performance Car TV's marketing power.

The inaugural season was in 2007 and consisted of two rounds at Manfeild Autocourse and Pukekohe Park Raceway.

The 2008 season expanded the number of rounds to five and the number of tracks to four, including Taupo Motorsport Park, and a round in the South Island at Powerbuilt Tools International Raceway, Ruapuna.

The 2009 season continued with five rounds, including the new Hampton Downs Raceway.

The series helped propel some New Zealand drivers into the world arena, with top drivers such as Carl Ruiterman, Gary Whiter and Mike Whiddett being invited to compete overseas in events such as D1GP World Allstars, Red Bull Drifting World Championship, Formula D and European Drift Championship

Drifting refers to a driving technique and to a motorsport where the driver intentionally over steers, causing loss of traction in the rear wheels through turns, while maintaining vehicle control and a high exit speed. A car is New Zealand drifting when the rear slip angle is greater than the front slip angle prior to the corner apex, and the front wheels are pointing in the opposite direction to the turn (e.g. car is turning left, wheels are pointed right or vice versa), and the driver is controlling these factors. As a motor sport, professional drifting competitions are held worldwide. New Zealand Drift racing challenges drivers to navigate a course in a sustained sideslip by exploiting coupled nonlinearities in the tire force response.

Japanese Origin

Modern drifting as a sport started out as a racing technique popular in the All Japan Touring Car Championship races over 30 years ago. Motorcycling legend turned driver, Kunimitsu Takahashi, was the foremost creator of drifting techniques in the 1970s. He is noted for hitting the apex (the point where the car is closest to the inside of a turn) at high speed and then drifting through the corner, preserving a high exit speed. This earned him several championships and a legion of fans who enjoyed the spectacle of smoking tires. The bias ply racing tires of the 1960s-1980s lent themselves to driving styles with a high slip angle. As professional racers in Japan drove this way, so did the street racers.

Keiichi Tsuchiya (known as the Dorikin/Drift King) became particularly interested by Takahashi's drift techniques. Tsuchiya began practicing his drifting skills on the mountain roads of Japan, and quickly gained a reputation amongst the racing crowd. In 1987, several popular car magazines and tuning garages agreed to produce a video of Tsuchiya's drifting skills. The video, known as Pluspy, became a hit and inspired many of the professional drifting drivers on the circuits today. In 1988, alongside Option magazine founder and chief editor Daijiro Inada, he would help to organize one of the first events specifically for drifting called the D1 Grand Prix. He also drifted every turn in Tsukuba Circuit in Japan.

Western Adoption

One of the earliest recorded drift events outside Japan was in 1996, held at Willow Springs Raceway in Willow Springs, California hosted by the Japanese drifting magazine and organization Option. Inada, founder of the D1 Grand Prix in Japan, the NHRA Funny Car drag racer Kenji Okazaki and Keiichi Tsuchiya, who also gave demonstrations in a Nissan 180SX that the magazine brought over from Japan, judged the event with Rhys Millen and Bryan Norris being two of the entrants. Drifting has since exploded into a massively popular form of motorsport in North America, Australasia, and Europe. One of the first drifting competitions in Europe was hosted in 2002 by the OPT drift club at Turweston, run by a tuning business called Option Motorsport. The club held a championship called D1UK, then later became the Autoglym Drift Championship. For legal reasons, the business was forced to drop the Option and D1 name. The club has since been absorbed into the D1 Grand Prix franchise as a national series.

Present Day

Drifting has evolved into a competitive sport where drivers compete mostly in rear wheel drive cars, and occasionally all wheel drive cars, to earn points from judges based on various factors. At the top levels of competition, the D1 Grand Prix from Japan and now with a full series in the US have pioneered the sport. Others in Malaysia, Australia, Pro-drift in Europe, BDC in the United Kingdom,URC (United Racers Club) in Bangladesh, SUPERDRIFT in Italy, Formula D in the United States, King of Europe Drift Series in Europe, Drift Mania in Canada, and the NZ Drift Series in New Zealand have also come along to further expand the sport into a legitimate motor sport worldwide. The drivers within these series were originally influenced by the pioneers from D1 Japan and are able to keep their cars sliding for extended periods of time, often linking several turns. Drifting with decades of race history and its relatively recent fame in the United States (the first official drift points race of D1 Grand Prix was held in the summer of 2003) has become its own authority yet Formula D remains as the largest and most prestigious championship in North America with an international field of professionally supported drivers.

Drifting in Australia began to take shape as a national event over the last decade, and now a dedicated event, namely the OzDriftGP, facilitates the sport on a national scale, between several key locations around the country. Local events are also run, such as the SPG Drift Series (Tas).

Amateur "Tafheet" or "Hjwalah" drifting on public roads is a significant problem in Saudi Arabia

Source: wikipedia

Links:
www.headlicehitman.com
www.nztraffic.com