Motor sports fans get the drift

Tuesday, July 17, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.

Dave Paquin, a 60-year-old truck driver from Sacramento , stood out from the raucous crowd that overflowed the grandstands behind him during the Las Vegas D1 Grand Prix at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

By Paquin's estimate, 80 percent of the spectators who packed the makeshift drift course were young enough to be his grandchildren. And most of them probably already knew what Paquin realized a few hours into his first exposure to professional drifting.

The tire-smoking, synchronized skidding that is drifting, he said, just might be the future of motor sports.

"When you and I started following racing, what did we drive?" he said . "We drove a Ford or a Chevy and that's what raced " in the National Hot Rod Association and NASCAR.

"Fords and Chevy are still racing, but what are we all driving now? These cars here are what the kids are driving today and that's what they want to see race."

Indeed, except for a lone Chevrolet Corvette, the field for Saturday's main event was loaded with compact cars bearing the nameplates Nissan, Subaru, Toyota and Mazda.

Ditto for the speedway's parking lot. A quick tour of the grounds revealed an abundance of tricked-out compact import cars - their occupants lured to The Strip for the drifting exhibition, an NHRA Sport Compact drag race and an "extreme automotive lifestyle" car show.

Long popular in Japan, where the company that owns the D1 Grand Prix professional series sells about 200,000 DVDs of its drifting events per month, the sport quickly is catching on in America.

Whether most of the fans who filled the 5,300 temporary grandstand seats and stood three and four deep along the chain-link fence that lined the course actually understood the nuances of drifting is doubtful. But it was clear, from the reaction of this group of largely 20-somethings to the amazing displays of car control, that drifting isn't going away anytime soon.

"This is awesome," said a teenager from Las Vegas, who identified himself only as Jay, as a pair of cars slid side by side through the slalom course. When pressed, he said part of the appeal was that a drifting event "is a lot shorter than a NASCAR race."

On that point, at least, he and Paquin had quite a bit in common.