DRIFTING · Competition Craft

TANDEM: THE LEAD RUN

13 min · Full library · written from fifteen years in the terrain

The point

After this lesson you can lead a battle in a way that puts the pressure back onto the chase car, using only legal driving, and you know exactly where the line sits between running your line and manipulating the other driver.

Half the answer, free

The Technique

  1. The lead run is judged against roughly the same standard as your solo run. In most formats the lead is assessed on line, angle, style and speed as if the chase car were not there, while the chase is assessed on proximity and how well they mirror you. That gives the lead a simple and difficult job: drive your qualifying run, exactly, with someone's bumper in your door. Almost everything drivers instinctively want to do when defending, such as slowing the entry to make the corner tighter or taking an unusual line, costs the very thing being scored. Your run is your defence.
  2. Consistency is the weapon, and it is not the same thing as predictability. The chase closes distance where they can anticipate you, so being erratic feels like it should help, and it does not, because erratic driving scores badly and produces mistakes. What beats a chase car is a run they can see coming and still cannot match: an entry speed they have to think about, a rotation rate that arrives earlier than theirs, and transitions with no dead time in them. The pace is set at initiation. If your entry is genuinely faster and your car is rotated before theirs is, everything downstream is their problem, and you have not done a single thing a judge can penalise.
Still under the glass
  • The legal ways to break a chase car, where the rules draw the line, and what to do after contact
  • 6 more technique steps
  • The 3 mistakes that undo it, with fixes
  • The drill that builds the reflex
  • The safety non-negotiables

It opens when you book a trip that runs drifting - these are the exact drills you run with your coach out there. Your booking unlocks this whole library.

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Read this before you send

These sports kill people. Not rarely, and not only the reckless - every season they kill riders who were experienced, fit, well equipped and doing everything properly. That is the honest starting position and everything else we do sits on top of it.

The mountain does not know who you are. Snow releases on people with twenty years in it. Machines roll on riders who have done that line a hundred times. Water, rock, trees and other people are indifferent to how good you have become. Every time you go out you are accepting a real chance that it goes wrong, and no amount of skill removes that chance - it only changes the odds.

What that looks like in these disciplines, plainly: avalanche burial and asphyxiation, being crushed under a machine, head and spinal injuries from falls and impacts, drowning, hypothermia, and collisions with trees, rocks and other riders.

We work in remote country, so distance is part of it. A serious injury usually means hours before a helicopter can reach you, and weather sometimes means no helicopter at all. Help being close is not a feature of any trip we run.

This is exactly why we prepare the way we do. Training before you ride, gear standards, minimum party sizes, people who know the ground, and a willingness to call a day off. All of it is about improving your odds and making the group capable of looking after itself. None of it makes anything safe, none of it makes anyone competent, and passing our training is not a qualification. Anybody who tells you they can make this safe is selling something.

Everyone out there is relying on everyone else having been honest about what they can actually do. If reading this has made you hesitate, that is worth listening to rather than talking yourself out of.

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