Drift!

Mauro started his life in this business helping out people like me on car shoots, but by then he had already accumulated what he estimates to be over 15,000 hours of sideways travel, demonstrating to AMG customers how to control oversteer on the Mercedes-Benz World steering pad at Brooklands.

On his IMDb profile he is credited with appearing on over 120 episodes of Top Gear and 35 episodes of The Grand Tour, stunt driving for messrs Clarkson, Hammond and May; he has worked with Tom Cruise on the Mission: Impossible franchise (Cruise is apparently a genuinely superb driver) and was one of just two precision drivers on the most recent Bond film, No Time To Die. Indiana Jones, Men in Black, Wonder Woman, The Mummy, you name it and Mauro’s driven on it. He is the former long time holder of the Guinness World Record for the longest sustained slide, his 2.3km drift ending not when he ran out of talent, but when his C63 AMG coupé ran out of rear tyres.

So I asked Mauro what he thought, he looked at me the way you’d look at a dinner partner if they asked if you’d mind terribly passing the salt if it wasn’t too much trouble and just said, ‘yes mate, of course’.

So off he toddled in this Porsche, flicked it into the fourth gear curve, rode it extravagantly sideways all the way through, snapped it straight at the exit and wandered off around the rest of the lap. A minute or two later he reappeared, said ‘again?’, the photographer gave the thumbs up, so off he went for a repeat performance. I can’t remember how many times he did it in the end but when all was done and my shot was safely in the can, he looked about as stressed as I do falling asleep on the sofa after a rather good Sunday lunch. I had my image which meant I had my story.

But it is just as well that story was not solely about the art of the high-speed drift because I’d have been completely unqualified to tell it. But it has always interested me a lot – and frustrated me a little – that some can drift a car at speed with no greater difficulty than they brush their teeth, while others who’d still rate themselves as decent drivers, can’t.

Yes, I do think I am a decent driver. I’d be pretty poor at this job were I not. I’m not a prodigy, nor even a rare talent, but I’ve raced brand new cars with slicks and wings, cars over 100 years old without even front-wheel brakes, and cars from every generation in between, and usually done well enough to hope and, I think, reasonably believe that I am at least, well, decent.

But I cannot do those drift shots beloved of television producers, YouTubers and monthly magazines alike; or, more accurately, I’ve never tried because I fear what I believe would be the likely spectrum of consequences, from egg on face past car in wall, to self in hospital.

It’s something that could get me down. In fact it used to. I think most of us tend to judge ourselves by the standards of our peers and in this area at least, I come up decidedly short relative to the best in the business, like Mauro.

But I don’t think like that any more, and for being freed from that tyranny between my ears I have a book to thank with perhaps the worst title of any ever published. It’s called A French Kiss with Death and while you’d never guess it, it’s an otherwise fascinating account of the making of Steve McQueen’s famed movie Le Mans.

I think it is well known enough that, to make it look real, McQueen insisted it was filmed at near racing speeds, which is why so many of the drivers from the actual 1970 Le Mans, including F1 stars like Jacky Ickx, Jo Siffert, Brian Redman, Richard Attwood, Derek Bell and rally driver Vic Elford were paid good money to hang around for weeks after the race to do the driving. But when someone was required to do a big skid in a Ferrari 512S between a guard rail and another 512 that had been artfully parked across the circuit as if it had just spun, their begloved hands remained firmly in their laps. Instead a bloke called Rob Slotemaker – a decent driver but not a patch on any of the above named – was drafted in to make the Ferrari perform for the camera. Because world-class racer he may not have been, but as a drifter he bowed to none and had his own drift school in his native Holland to prove it.

Dario Franchitti – three times Indy 500 winner and four times IndyCar champion – is indisputably one of the finest drivers these or any other isles have produced, and he can’t do those massive skids either despite today being one of the fastest racers of historic cars out there, cars whose skinny crossply tyres mean they have to be driven with a degree of slip to make them go fast. Just not the full bonfire out the back. ‘I’m totally rubbish [which may not be the precise word he used] at drifting and don’t mind admitting it!’ he tells me. ‘Jackie always taught me to drive as neatly as possible…’

All forms of driving have their specialists. You might not think that driving a 2-litre, front-drive family saloon around a track would be a big deal after winning both F1 and IndyCar titles, but Nigel Mansell would likely beg to differ. No full-time F1 driver has ever won a round of the World Rally Championship; no full-time WRC driver has ever won a World Championship Formula 1 race.

You may wonder how Mauro, the absolute best in the business at what he does, gets on in the white heat of competitive racing. And you’re going to keep on wondering because Mauro has never done a race in his life, any more than Usain Bolt has run a marathon. There are plenty of motoring journalists who are good at drifting, and many have done a lot of racing too. But none I know of has made it as a professional racing driver at any level. It’s actually more likely that a racing driver becomes a professional motoring journalist, and there have been a few examples of that over the years.

But I’m still strangely captivated by drifting, and from time to occasional time I have wondered why. I’m ashamed to admit I suspect it comes down to this: if I could do it well, people would think me a better driver than they do now. I’d like that, even if it weren’t true. It’d appeal to my inner show-off. I could give people smoky passenger laps and they’d return in wide-eyed awe of my talent. I’d like that too. I could look down my nose at all those poor, talentless other motoring journalists lacking my singular brilliance. I hope I wouldn’t like that.

Perhaps it’s easier than it looks. Like I said: I’ve never tried. So I asked Mauro if it can be learned. And to my surprise, he reckons it can, at least by most. ‘You can always tell, and some you know will never get it. It’s like those who can’t rub their heads while patting their tummies. If you can’t coordinate throttle and steering you’re never going to get it. But yes, most people prepared to put in the leg work can learn how to drift.’

What, then, is the secret? ‘It’s all about anticipation, knowing what the car is going to do before it does it. If you have to react to what the car is doing, it’s never going to work out because you’ll always be behind the game. What you want is the car reacting to what you’re doing…’ So simple, so obvious, so true. But so easy?

A lot depends on the car, but Mauro is now at a level where he’ll high-speed drift a car not just the first time he drives it, but the first time he turns into a corner in it. He didn’t like drifting early McLarens lacking limited-slip differentials because they’d react badly to the required power-on technique by trying to slow the spinning inside wheel using brake pressure, thereby slowing the entire car when the whole point is to maintain momentum. They can be spiky and inconsistent. But so long as it has an LSD, it can be rear-wheel drive or four-wheel drive; front, mid or rear-engined; turbocharged, naturally aspirated or electric; he really couldn’t care less.

Does he ever lose control? ‘I spun a Pagani Huayra the first time I drove it, but that was in a safe area and kind of deliberate because I was really just finding out how much lock it had. Not enough as it turns out. Once I knew, I spent the rest of the day drifting it and never spun again…’

But just how fast can he drift a car? ‘It’s really all about torque. If you have enough of it to keep the rear wheels spinning, over 100mph is usually not a problem.’ Blimey.

Perhaps I should learn. Mauro and I go back years and I know he’d be delighted and very patient if I asked him to show me how. But he also mentions that old and very true adage about it taking 10,000 hours to become truly good at whatever it is you’re trying to do and I’ve simply not got the time nor, frankly, the inclination.

I’m arrogant enough to think I might get reasonably good at it, but sane enough to know I’ll never be brilliant and that one day I might just throw something valuable into the scenery and that’s a prospect I can happily live without. So I must accept I’ll never be a world-class high-speed drifter and take comfort from the illustrious company I keep in this regard. In short, I’m over it. Honest.