The first thing that you have to remember is that drifting in real life is massively different than drifting in the game, but also pretty similar... What I mean by that is not so much the obvious points, like having to maintain a ready supply of tyres, and trying not to screw up so bad that you slide your $40,000 tuned ride into a Jersey Barrier, ripping off a quarter panel or worse. No, the difference is in the techniques that you use for drifting.

Most novice drivers find drifting to be a confusing and often hard to manage challenge, mostly because they do not fully understand the physics involved, so the first thing that we are going to do is examine the process of drifting.

In drifting this basic formula is what you must overcome in order to maintain your drift.. Consider the motive force of your car, which is provided by its engine and transmission, to be the positive energy source. This energy is transferred through the drive train to the wheels, and through the wheels to the driving surface. Under normal conditions a very small amount of the energy automatically dissipates due to the resistance provided by a combination of the driving surface and the air around you, bleeding off the energy so that if you remove the source of positive energy -- take your foot off the gas and put the car in neutral -- the resistance (counter-energy) of the surface combined with the air around you will eventually cause your car to come to a complete stop.

The process of Drifting at its most basic level refers to a driving technique in which you intentionally over steer into curves, initiating loss of traction in the rear wheels while at the same time maintaining control of the car largely with the front wheels, both creating and overcoming inertia at the same time. You do this by applying power to an imaginary path that we call slip angles.

What you are actually doing when this happens is exploiting coupled nonlinearities in the tyre force response by exerting energy and control to sustain the sideslip -- drifting in other words!

Tuneing the drift car

[spoil]The first thing that you have to change when setting up a drift car is adding a mechanical limited slip differential (LSD). The preferred form of LSD for drifting is the 2-way clutch type, and then you want to upgrade the clutch to the strongest model available for you car. Of course if you have damage set to appearance only this will not matter as much, but it is a good idea anyway.
Finally you will want to alter the gearsets in your car so that they have closer ratios in order to keep the engine within the power band range.
You can use the standard road-racing suspension and get good results, but jacking up the spring rates will provide a more uniform rate of energy transfer, and using a stiff sway bar will make it a lot easier to break the traction as you enter your turns.
For your engine you will want to tune it so that peak HP is reduced in order to have a wider torque band for easier throttling, regardless of the engine size. Meaning that if you have a mid-size engine or a monster Hemi, you still want it set up this way as that gives you maximum control over acceleration.

The following techniques can be used in Forza 4 depending upon the setup if your car and what assists you have. For example some will require you to be doing both clutch AND shifting, not simply shifting. Some can be adapted for use with an automatic transmission but you will likely find that your results in that case are less predictable and harder to control.There are basically two schools here -- brake and clutch. We will look at brake first, because that is what you will probably start with as a novice, and then examine clutch, which is what you really want to be working towards mastering.

If you are really new to drifting or to racing in Forza you might find that these lessons come a lot easier if you start out on an open oval track (there are several in the Test Track) so that you can begin in a lower gear and at a lower speed.Star out in first gear, and just get used to steering around in the circle and arc pattern. Once you get used to that, go up a gear, and keep doing this until you are comfortable driving in tight and wide arcs, then start learning to do small and well-controlled drifts.The best way to do that is to use the Emergency Brake to break the traction and then release it and accelerate to keep the wheels spinning while you work the steering. Once you complete the drift -- no matter how brief that drift is before your car automatically straightens to correct for what is obviously an unnatural condition, you will now know what it feels like to drift!