Do you enjoy driving games? Well, good, then this is for you.

While shunting your vehicle around a track at a million miles per hour with pinpoint precision may be a whole lot of fun in itself, sims such as Forza 3 and the upcoming GT5 have realistic physics engines that pretty much allow any real world car setup to be applied to the game.

Drifting is its own beast, it’s a different world when compared to that of racing. The appeal? Screaming your car around a track, keeping it on the absolute edge as much as possible for as long as possible.

Start getting it right and you will get an incredible feeling of achievement as you counter-steer, put the power on and glide through a series of corners in succession.

I managed to go from knowing nothing about setups to clocking just over the 100th best drift score in the world on the Tsukuba circuit by doing these easy steps.

Getting a setup is pretty simple, here’s how to do it.

Make Your Choice

Ok, first thing you will need is a Drift car (duh). You want to opt for a rear wheel drive car that can get the business done. Among top favorites are the Nissan Silvia, Toyota Supra, Toyota Trueno, Mazda RX-7 and more.

There is a very easy way to browse around for your new toy. Project Blackjack are known for their skills with drifting, producing multiple Forza drift videos over the series and even being hired by Microsoft to create the Forza stunts trailer that was seen a while back. Thanks to Forza’s community features, you can now download Drift tunes and setups directly from the big boys themselves.

^ This is my baby. Remember, if you love your car and make it pretty, it will drift better, I promise *cough*.

What you want to do is go to the Storefront, and search for tune setups. When in search, change the keyword to Drift and then manually input the letters “BLKJ”. This will bring up a list of drift tune setups, the ones that say BLKJ in the description are made by Project Blackjack. Also note that there are other guys who make good setups so be on the lookout for ones that are popular or have high downloads.

What you actually want to do is to get into the Storefronts of the guys who are posting setups, I found that Project Blackjack has two guys posting up setups, they go by the names of BLKJ Slaphappy and BLKJ kidnice.

Once you are in their storefronts, browse through the setups that they have until you have seen a car that you think you would enjoy driving.

Tricking Your Car Out

If for instance, you picked the Nissan 350Z tune setup, you can go ahead and purchase it, (will usually cost 10,000 credits). I can personally recommend BLKJ kidnice’s Nissan 350Z tune setup as a great car to learn with.

Now that you have bought the setup, you need to get the car and have it automatically upgraded. If you don’t already have the car that you need, go and purchase it from an auction or the “buy cars” menu.

A Nissan 350Z will cost you around 40,000 credits but it is actually the required upgrade that will cost the most, which will usually be in the region of 90,000 – 130,000 credits.

Once you have the car, go to your garage and get into it. Select the car so that it’s menu pops up and then at the bottom you will see “my tuning setups”. From there you will be able to load the downloaded setup into the car but will first be asked to do the necessary upgrades to match the setup. All of this is done automatically and only requires that you have the credits to pay for it.

^ Welcome to Drift heaven. Fujimi Kaido. Get 100,000 points in a lap and score yourself an achievement.

Get Drifting

Once that’s done, you are good to go!

Go to hot lap mode, choose your new drift car and then start giving it stick. I recommend that you start on a track like Tsukuba as it small and has very short straights. Remember to use your d-pad to switch your car over to Drift Points mode, so that it shows your score through corners and keeps your lap scores.

Even better, get a few buddies and do it together, it makes it easier to share tips on what works and make the experience all the better.

End of Part One:

Coming Soon – Drifting tips and techniques