Bringing Sexy Back

Damian spendlove’s provocatively-styled nissan 200sx was built in a home garage using spare parts, inspired by the stunning japanese street drifters of the early noughties

- Dan Goodyer

What’s happened to drift cars lately? Without wanting to sound negative, they used to look so cool. Nowadays the motorsport side of things seems to have eaten up the street side, drifting’s roots. Just look at most top-level competition cars now and you’ll see that they don’t bare much resemblance to a road car at all.

Huge spoilers, missing bits of bodywork and completely gutted interiors are everywhere. As are V8 engine swaps, often with one or two huge turbochargers on top. Six hundred horsepower used to be considered an obscene amount of power in the drift scene. Now it’s fairly common.

But while these cars undoubtedly grab the attention of anyone watching drifting for the first time, that’s not what the game used to be about. For those of us involved in the first wave of drifting madness in the UK, right at the start of the noughties, it was all about street cars; Drift Tengoku and Option, D1GP and Best Motoring International all featured them. Whether you were into Japanese cars that drifted at urban crossroads or up in the mountains, all the cars had one thing in common. They looked awesome.

The combination of low rideheight, dished wheels and the very minimum of external addon parts (often only a respray, sometimes in that drift team’s colours) helped define the movement. The car spec didn’t make the difference, the driver did. Years later and half the world away, Damian Spend love has taken the same approach. Much for the same reasons.