My Review of the Caterham Drift Experience

I know I may have posted this before, but this is my first experience with the Text Formatting tools.

What Is It?

Caterham offer two types of experience. A drift experience and a track experience. Both of these cost around £250, but you do get a lot more time in the car (I think I got an hour total), and you get a lot more smiles per £ spent in my eyes.

I was lucky enough to book last minute (as a birthday present) and got a tidy 15% discount because it was under subscribed. Even after this discount there were only 9 drivers on the day, which is half usual so we all got double time in the car. I had never drifted before I went

The Car

For both types of experience you get a car setup for the job, the drift experience the car was set-up for maximum oversteer. The caterhams we were driving had 300HP (a basic 220 road going version which had some upgrades). The tyres were a hard compound for minimum grip and maximum longevity. There were two cars between the 9 of us.

The Day

The experience ran from 9AM until about 3:30PM. First we were given a drivers briefing, and then we were given a demonstration of the first course. This course was set to give us an eye in. It involved a long slide at the back and a doughnut in the middle. Each driver in this case was given 6 runs at the course to hone their skills.

The second course was a simple of figure of 8 course to try and get a ‘flow going’ and throwing the car from one drift into the next one. This was a great course, and it really highlighted how a well set-up car can just flow from one drift to the next.

The final course was a mixture of what we had learned throughout the day. It had 2 slaloms and two doughnuts. The day was finished up with a drift competition in which I came fourth. I would have won had I not messed up and did the back doughnut the wrong way.
Here is a link to a youtube video of one of my better runs. Throughout that course I had issues with the back doughnut, and I messed it up on this run too.

“Best Run of the Day”

Conclusions

I had a thrilling day out, the hospitality was great too (tea and coffee all day with a cold buffet lunch). The day was great and in their words to us all ”you all went from drifting zeros to drifting heroes today”