All-you-can-eat. Buy-one-get-one-free. Drift mode.
These are all tangible, easily understood and tantalising concepts. But when scrutinised, each concept is perhaps only as glamourous as their initial meaning. All you can eat is a brilliant concept as it drills into the capitalist desire of a good deal, the culinary desire of gorging and the primal desire of a challenge. A real quality meal is rarely had at a restaurant offering all can eat. That’s not to say the food isn’t of good quality or that its not fulfilling or healthy. But what is lacking is the presentation, judgement, emphasis and thought of an expert.
Buy one get one free is a similar concept. Great as a concept but rarely applied to things of real worth. It’s nice, but you can live without it.
Drift mode is much the same. On the outside it sounds exciting and fun and thrilling and something you’d use all the time. Except it never works out that way. You may use drift mode a handful of times, and then never touch it again.
We first saw drift mode with the Mk.3 Ford Focus RS and it was all any one could talk about when the feature was announced.
Drift mode!
It was a great marketing exercise but in reality, we think of it as admitting a car is dynamically uninteresting and flatfooted. If you have to select a special mode just to get the car to rotate in anything like an enjoyable manner, then you’ve lost the game before you’ve even taken your first step forward.
Audi with its new RS3, has fallen down the same metaphorical rabbit warren, by including a drift mode. And this time the announcement is being met with a car community that has a far greater level of baked-in cynicism.
When you peel back the layers of drift mode, it becomes clear that it is perhaps the one of the most deranged systems a car could claim to be equipped with. There is no other mode that suggests a complete divorce from the entirety of reality such as drift mode.
In the real world – away from some nice photography found in magazines of that pert-Ingolstadt rear end showing some degrees of rotation – what good does drift mode actually do?
Granted, it might help sell some cars to some particularly easy-to-convince buyers, but apart from that, its benefits are not so clear.
Firstly, we must consider the thoughts and feelings about drifting, of the public and the authorities.
No surprises here, but it’s universally vilified by everyone that doesn’t get it. Which means probably about 99.5 percent of the population. Drifting is dangerous, crass, uncouth and thuggish in the eyes of the public; and in the eyes of the authorities drifting is considered a member of the instant license-losing club of driving offences.
All it takes is one overly-nosy business with CCTV overlooking a roundabout or a particularly vitriolic member of the dashcam brigade, and some light-hearted driving fun turns into a catastrophic life changing event.
Drifting on the public road is plain illegal.
What about trackdays then? Trackdays are often cited as a good way to exorcise one’s speed demons. Surely a trackday is the place to go drifty drifty. Well, that’s a no too. Unfortunately, most trackday providers in the UK expressly forbid drifting, and if you are caught repeat offending you can be excluded from a trackday entirely.
So where does that leave the budding Audi RS3 drift mode operator?
Perhaps a drift event, surely there are some like minded fellows there. At these events there will be plenty of folk that appreciate the finer points of going around corners whilst looking through their side windows, but an AWD hot hatch simply isn’t driftable enough for a day like that.
So we arrive at the real conclusion here.
Drift mode is pure coy marketing. Inclusion of this mode is simply a distraction devised to burn as a bright distraction that is used equally to garner hype and, more disappointingly, to crudely plaster over dynamic shortcomings.
If a car was as dynamically exciting as drift mode would suggest, then why would it need a separate mode to go sideways? Surely a properly sorted car would always have the ability to freely rotate around its axis as part of its repertoire at any given point, instead of needing to be in a different mode.
What’s disappointing is that Audi could have actually tried to give the RS3 some inherent Mitsubishi Evo-like agility. They could have just left the agility there for everyone to discover organically, but instead they cashed out, fadded-in and chose the easy option.
Kerbside 