Kunimitsu Takahashi- The Father Of Drifting

27 Aug 2017

The father of drifting

When you mention the start of a very high skilled and very delicate art of drifting first thing that comes to your mind is probably a man(a king) that goes by the name of Keiichi Tsuchiya aka Drift King and his screaming Hachiroku with a green carbon hood.

But massively oversteering your car didn’t start with the man in the green racing suit, it actually started with a retired motorcycle driver…Kunimitsu Takahashi was very good at racing he raced with motorcycles cars and even formulas(for a short time).He was also very fearless, brave I should say because while other drivers where terrified of oversteer Kunimitsu did it intentionally as a racing method to maintain speed.

Keiichi being a young aspiring racing driver had a driver to look up to and that was, you guessed it Kunimitsu Takahashi.Keiichi started drifting in his races to intertain the audience but it didn’t take him to long to see how drifting could become a sport of it’s own.He then started practising drifting in the mountains of Japan and we all know what that led to…

So to conclude Kunimitsu Takahashi is the father of drifting he started drifting his car before Tsuchiya, Keiichi made drifting a real thing he mastered the art of going sideways and he is therefore called the drift king.

#blogpost

Comments

MR2maniac Debodeep

Tsuchiya still created drifting, Takahashi wasn’t drifting as you said he was oversteering to maintain speed- not drifting. He just used Takahashi as a mentor.

yes but drifting is essentially co ntrolling oversteer…

I’d say that drifting as a racing technique existed forever, while Tsuchiya made it the sport it is today.

Kunimitsu is Keiichi Tsuchiya’s idol, and then his mentor when they were teammates in the Japanese Touring Car Championship where they raced the Group A Taisan R32 GTR. To be fair, Keiichi Tsuchiya did set his lifetime goal to race a GTR because he watched Kunimitsu drift/race the Hakosuka GTR and he thought it was very cool. But Keiichi Tsuchiya’s skills were developed on a snowy hill where he drifted his AE86, but not necessarily from Kunimitsu since they hadn’t even met back in the 80s.