Drifting, in an automotive sense, means different things to different people. Back in the 1950s, Skip Hudson and Dan Gurney famously practiced four-wheel slides on raw farmland in preparation for dirt-track racing. Meanwhile, in Europe, Formula 1 driver Tony Brooks was doing the same thing on pavement, as he told Steve Havelock in issue #91’s “The Old Guard.”
Drifting as a standalone sport, however, came from Japan. In the ’60s, Kunimitsu Takahashi, later known as the “Father of Drifting,” began sliding his underpowered race cars around tight corners. And in the late 1970s, “Drift King” Keiichi Tsuchiya made his name as he transitioned from illegal street racing to circuit competition.
From its underground origins in Tokyo, Japanese-style drifting has become a worldwide phenomenon, from anime (Tsuchiya is the inspiration for the popular series Initial D) and video games to movies (remember The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift?) and beyond. In the real world, organized drifting is everywhere; here in the United States, you can probably find
it at a racetrack near you, sanctioned by Formula Drift, which was founded way back in 2003. And now there’s even a Ferrari—a massively modified 2011 599 GTB Fiorano nicknamed Fiorella—that has entered the fray in America, taking on the traditional Toyotas and Nissans.
Before we talk Prancing Horse, let’s look at the appeal of Formula Drift (which I’ll shorten to FD). Each explosively noisy, chokingly smoky, extremely intense, 60-second race sees two contestants—one leading, one following—enter the course sideways at speeds up to 90 mph. From there, the competition is a sort of pas de deux, with each driver evaluated on things like consistency of line, angle, style, speed, and how close the follower stays to the leader—without touching, of course. The drivers then switch places and run the track a second time, after which the judges announce their decision.
That’s when things get unusual. After the judges name the winner, the always vociferous audience gets to approve or reject that choice by acclamation. It’s a carnival atmosphere where the only thing missing is a Roman Emperor’s thumb. Entire families (I saw many with babies still in strollers) flock to these two-day events to experience the open paddock, promotional events, sponsored exhibits, burning rubber, and noise intense enough to straighten the wrinkles in your brain.
It all feels like a throwback to the ’50s, when you could watch the likes of Shelby, Masten Gregory, and Briggs Cunningham dueling in their Ferraris for pocket money. It costs less than $100 to bring the whole family to one of FD’s high-octane events.
Returning to the format, newcomers and lower-ranked drivers compete in a first-day bracket. The top drivers move up to the second day’s bracket, where they compete with the highest-ranked drivers from the previous event to crown the ultimate victor.
Adding to the obvious challenges, FD circuits can be, and are, dramatically different from one another. My local, Oldbridge Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey, features a figure-eight layout, with the cars transitioning their angle of slide right in the center of the track.
“The beauty of Formula Drift is that it can adapt to almost any setting, so there’s no pre-set track layout,” says FD spokesperson Greg Emmerson. “This is why you see a diverse range of track locations, from street circuits in Long Beach to road courses like Road Atlanta and ovals like Irwindale, etc.”
AND NOW, LIKE CLINT EASTWOOD MAKING his first appearance in a Sergio Leone Western, it’s time to introduce our hero: Federico Sceriffo, 42 years old—“but going on 18,” as he puts it—and hailing from Milan, Italy.
“By age 5, Italian boys dream of driving cars,” Sceriffo tells me, “and at 13, I was sneaking out in my mother’s BMW Z3. By age 15, I’d had two collisions!”
Professional drifter Federico Sceriffo.
After that second accident totalled his mother’s car, Sceriffo was sentenced to what he describes as “longtime detention,” namely three years of hard, unpaid labor at his father’s workplace to repay the loss. But by age 18, Federico’s passion led him to three years of practice with his everyday car. Through connections and friends he was able to attend a Mitsubishi rally “casting event,” in which he finished fourth in a field of ten that included professional drivers.
“I was so thrilled that they offered me a seat!” recalls Sceriffo. But with Mitsubishi covering only 50 percent of his costs, “After six months, I had to admit I couldn’t afford it, and I had nothing to sell sponsors due to having no previous racing experience.”
It seemed like his motorsport dream was over. Then, one day in 2003, while watching YouTube with a friend, Sceriffo discovered drifting.
“I was drawn in by the fact that the cars were going completely out of control,” he says. “It made me super excited.”
The following year, Sceriffo attended his first Italian Super Drift Professional Challenge event—as a spectator. But he was already a hugely popular figure on the local scene, due his extravagant dress, two huge pit bulls, and 500-hp all-wheel-drive Subaru station wagon, so when one team’s driver didn’t show up, Sceriffo used his celebrity to step into the limelight.
“When I arrived, the crowd was already cheering me,” he says. “I dragged the event organizer to the track manager, who convinced him that I would energize the entire crowd to with my performance. It took crazy courage, but I was right.”
Sceriffo scored a podium finish in his own car, a result which relaunched his dream.
“From 2006 to 2008, I did the Italian Championship,” he explains. “I won five European events with that same Subaru, converted to rear-wheel drive.”
In 2008, Sceriffo moved to Japan, where the originators of the D1 Grand Prix drifting series had created an international competition/audition program to award the first-ever D1GP license to non-Japanese drivers.
“Team Orange, the most international Japanese team in the world, was invited to select the contestants,” Sceriffo explains. “In addition to Japanese drivers, Team Orange invited about 25 foreigners, each representing one nation. I represented Italy. We all flew to Japan in 2008 and, after an intense period of training and selection, the remaining drivers got to compete with 250-hp cars. And I won all three competitions: in 2008, 2010, and 2012.”
Sceriffo had befriended Team Orange’s founder, Nobushige Kumakubo, one of the sport’s pioneers (as well as a stunt driver in the aforementioned Tokyo Drift), and drove the car with which Kumakubo had won the 2006 D1 GP championship. In the meantime, Sceriffo started his own drifting school in Italy. In addition to teaching, he often organized drifting exhibitions, bringing Team Orange to his homeland.
In 2013, Sceriffo was hired by Red Bull China to compete in championship drifting events in Zhuhai, near Macao, and Shenzhen, close to Hong Kong. He did that for four years, during which time he gained YouTube fame by drifting the seven-mile road that winds its way up Tianmenshan Mountain.
“I was pitted against James Tang, a local Chinese national Red Bull driver at that time,” says Sceriffo. “It’s 99 corners and it’s called ‘The Route to Heaven.’ I beat James, then he became my teammate, and now he’s one of my best friends.”
Then, in 2018, a group of investors approached Sceriffo about developing and campaigning the world’s first professional drift supercar. That’s how Fiorella was born.
ONCE UPON A TIME, SCERIFFO’S FERRARI was a plain-old black 599 GTB with a 620-horsepower 6-liter V12, F1 transmission, and sleek aluminum Pininfarina bodywork. But stock doesn’t survive in drifting, so Fiorella received a roll cage, a six-speed sequential gearbox, wider fenders to accommodate wider wheels, and a revised steering rack that extended maximum steering angle from the stock 30 degrees to a whopping 70 degrees.
“That ‘adaptability’ allows me to spin the steering wheel like a Frisbee,” Sceriffo explains, a feat necessary to maintain a perfect parallel position relative to the leading car. “And Fiorella can do this as fast as 100 mph.”
The extreme steering angle, which helps to initiate and hold slides (and can be seen in the photo above), is what really differentiates drift cars from regular circuit-racing machines. In contrast, the Ferrari’s suspension is otherwise conventional, albeit upgraded over the factory hardware for increased strength and adjustability.
As in other forms of motorsport, drifters adjust ride height and damper settings to optimize grip, minimize the effect of bumps, and make the car easier or more difficult to rotate, all depending on the venue. And speaking of rotation, the Ferrari’s interior features a tall lever connected to a second set of calipers on the rear brake discs—just the thing to flick Fiorella sideways and let its far-from-factory engine do its thing.
Top-class drift cars require serious horsepower, so Sceriffo initially installed a pair of superchargers and a Motec engine-management system. Running on VP Racing E85 racing fuel, the internally stock Ferrari 6-liter V12 pumped out 952 horsepower.
“Many people do not know that Ferrari’s road car engines have about half the horsepower of which they are capable,” Sceriffo says. “We just brought this engine up to what Ferrari had designed.”
Fiorella competed for a few years in this configuration. Then, in 2021, Sceriffo decided it was time for a change.
“I met Anderson Dick, a supercar enthusiast and the owner of FuelTech,” he explains. “He’s an amazing person, down to earth, and he wanted to take on our challenge of building a winning Ferrari drift car. And then Garrett USA officially stepped in with a G42 1450 turbocharger. I now have a single turbo that makes 300 horsepower more than both the superchargers. I put in one single turbo with the wastegate on the cold side instead of the hot side, so my turbo continues spooling even at idle. As soon as I floor it, instant power.”
This rebirth also included fitting a new sequential gearbox from 6XD, but, as is always the case in motorsport, a custom-made race car is never really finished. During the 2024 season, Sceriffo continued solving technical challenges and developing the car to be more competitive.
“Nobody had ever modified a Ferrari as a drift car before,” he says, “and you can only use a limited amount of experience in drift cars of other sorts and translate them over to a Ferrari.”
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE SCERIFFO HAS FACED over the past six years is that, fundamentally, Fiorella doesn’t want to go sideways.
“I’ve had to learn how to drift a mid-engine car, a car with the engine behind the wheels,” he says, throwing up his hands in a typically Italian gesture of frustration. “I mean, she is a lady, and a fine lady just doesn’t normally like to dance around and blow a lot of rubber smoke. She will gladly do donuts all day, but to go 90 mph sideways? No.
“I am always making adjustments to gain better control, but she has a unique way,” he continues. “I simply have to trust her to death, otherwise she will just not drift because she has amazing grip. I have to build up a kind of body memory, my brain and body memorizing how to do these things just right, without even thinking, because if you’re a split-second too late….”
Sceriffo shrugs and looks over at two crew members who are replacing a custom fender that was torn off the previous night. Fiorella had danced too close to the leading car, costing her owner both points and money.
“It’s like inventing the wheel in 2024,” Sceriffo concludes, philosophically. “By which I mean, a lot of wheels have already been invented, right?”
Challenges aside, Sceriffo and his Ferrari have been gaining fans steadily. Recently, Microsoft added a virtual Fiorella to its Forza Horizon series of racing games, which will certainly draw even more attention. While I sit in the stands at Englishtown, I mention this to another spectator sitting next to me.
“A Ferrari?” he replies. “A Ferrari drift car? That’s iconic, man! Lots of people will come here just to see a car like that.”
It’s rumored that other supercars will be joining FD, something the series itself is looking forward to.
“Formula Drift already attracts one of the largest and youngest audiences in motorsport, and is excited to see brands like Ferrari join the series,” says spokesperson Emmerson. “Federico has done an incredible job developing the car and his style to where he’s a real threat to established drivers. He has a difficult job because he can’t share any data or parts with other teams, so he’s going it alone, but is very determined.”
All of this brings us to the big question: Do drifting and Ferrari really go together? It’s not a natural meeting point for the concours crowd, to be sure, nor those who don’t want the experience of ear-splitting mega-horsepower howls and clouds of literally burning rubber.
“Ferrari North America really loves our concept,” Sceriffo tells me, “but of course it’s the usual question about what others think. It’s a mix of things, and I understand that.”
As for me, I’m a fan. Watching the cars boil around side by side through Englishtown’s figure-eight feels like watching a Formula 1 race edited down to 30 seconds, or maybe a drag race twisted into an easier-to-watch pretzel. I was, and remain, entranced, even if I’m several decades older than a typical FD fan. And if Sceriffo succeeds in climbing the ranks in the United States as well as he did in Italy and Japan, he and Fiorella might well create a whole new group of passionate tifosi.
