How to drift with a keyboard

In short: carry speed into the corner, steer in and tap Space (handbrake), counter-steer as the tail swings out, then hold the angle with the throttle. On a keyboard every key is all-or-nothing, so you steer and feed the gas in short taps instead of holding keys down. Practise on a wide track first, then link corners for the big multipliers.

The keys

Rest your left hand on WASD with the thumb on Space: then throttle, steering and handbrake sit under three different fingers and you can work them at the same time. The arrow keys work too, but the handbrake is then a long reach.

Your first drift, in five steps

1. Carry speed to the corner. Points grow with speed, and a slow car barely rotates. On the Oval, flat out down the straight is fine.
2. Turn in and tap the handbrake. Steer towards the corner and tap Space. The rear wheels lock, lose grip and the tail swings out. A tap is enough; holding it just scrubs speed.
3. Counter-steer. As the tail comes round, steer the other way, into the slide. The car helps a little here, but it is your hands that stop the spin.
4. Hold it with the throttle. Back on the gas, the driven rear wheels keep spinning and the slide lives on. Too much angle? Ease off a little. Too little? More throttle, or another small handbrake tap.
5. Straighten out. Let the steering come back to centre as the corner opens. About half a second of driving straight and the drift banks: its points appear on screen.

If you spin: you counter-steered too late or held the handbrake too long. Tap, catch, throttle. If you understeer into the wall instead, you turned in too gently: tap the handbrake a moment earlier.

Why it feels harder on a keyboard, and the fix: tap-steering

A stick or a wheel can ask for 20 % steering. A key can only ask for 0 % or 100 %. Hold D through a slide and you keep asking for full lock, the car over-rotates and you spin. That is the whole reason keyboard drifting has a reputation for being hard, and the fix is the same in almost every racing game: steer in pulses.

• Tap-steer. Once the car is sideways, hold the angle with short taps of the counter-steer key: tap, release, tap. Each tap is a small correction. Longer taps for bigger corrections, never a held key.
• Feather the throttle. The same trick on W: full throttle pushes the angle up, a released key lets the rear grip and the car straightens. Tapping it gives you the half throttle a keyboard does not have.
• Use the handbrake as a reset. If the angle dies mid-corner, a quick extra tap of Space brings the tail back out. Do not hold it: the locked rear wheels drag speed away.

DRIFTIT is built to make this easier. A steering key does not snap the wheels to full lock: it eases in and reaches full lock in about 0.17 seconds, and lets go even faster (about 0.1 s back to centre), so a quick tap really is a small input. The steering lock also shrinks with speed, from 35.5° at a standstill to 20° at 72 km/h and 7° at 162 km/h, so a fast car will not snap round on one press. And while you slide, a small counter-steer assist turns the front wheels toward where the car is going; your taps only have to finish the job.

Drill: on the Oval, hold one sweeper sideways using only taps on the counter-steer key, with the throttle held down. When that works, do the next lap with the throttle tapped too. Two laps of this teach more than an hour of holding keys.

How the drift score works

Knowing the formula tells you what to practise. While the car is drifting:

• Points build every moment from speed and drift angle. The angle counts more than linearly, so a big, fast slide is worth far more than a lazy wiggle.
• The multiplier starts at ×1 and climbs by ×0.5 for every 1.5 seconds of continuous drift, up to ×10. Reaching ×10 takes 27 seconds without a break.
• The drift banks once you have been straight for a bit over half a second: you get the points times the multiplier, and the multiplier resets.
• Hit a wall and the drift you were holding is gone. On a timed track the run also restarts.

So the big scores come from linking: swinging from one corner straight into the next without ever straightening for half a second. A whole lap in one slide is the dream on tracks like Snake and Esses.

Linking corners: the transition

Between a right-hander and a left-hander the car has to swap its angle from one side to the other. This is the transition (or flick): ease off the throttle for a moment, steer hard the new way (a small handbrake tap helps on tight ones), and the tail swings across. Get back on the throttle as it passes the middle and catch it with counter-steer on the other side. The multiplier never notices, as long as the car stays sideways.

Practise it on Chicane and Esses, which exist for exactly this. Long Left is all left-handers: good for training your weaker hand.

Fast time vs big score

Every timed track in DRIFTIT is three laps against a target time, and the online leaderboard ranks your fastest three-lap total. A huge angle looks great but scrubs speed. For a time, drift just enough: a shallow, fast slide through the long sweepers, a sharp rotation at the hairpins, and grip down the straights. Your personal best rides along as a ghost car, and the split at each checkpoint tells you where the time went.

Common mistakes

• Holding the handbrake through the corner. It is an entry tool. Tap it, then drive the slide with the throttle.
• Holding a steering key. On a keyboard a held key is full lock. Tap it.
• Lifting off mid-drift. Without throttle the rear finds grip, the car snaps straight and the drift banks early.
• Turning in late. A drift needs room to rotate. Start the slide before the apex, not at it.
• Only looking at the car. Look at the exit. With the camera straight down you can see the next two corners: use them.

The same technique in other games

Nothing above is special to DRIFTIT. In arcade racers and most browser drift games the recipe is the same: break the rear loose (handbrake, or a quick flick of the steering), counter-steer, hold it with the throttle, and on a keyboard steer in taps. What changes from game to game:

• The handbrake key. Space is a common default on PC, but not universal: look in the game's controls menu before you start, and rebind it under your thumb if you can.
• How much the game helps. Arcade games often keep the slide going for you. Simulators (Assetto Corsa, BeamNG and the like) model the car much more closely, and players there usually recommend a gamepad or a wheel, because keys cannot give the small, steady inputs a sim needs. Some sims offer steering aids or key-steering speed settings: turn the speed down.
• Drive type. Rear-wheel drive is what lets the throttle hold a slide. In many games a front-wheel-drive car simply will not hold an angle on power, whatever you press.

For picks that play well on keys, see racing games to play with a keyboard. If you have a pad, drifting with a controller covers the analogue version of everything here.

Where to practise

Start with the Oval: two long 180° sweepers, perfect for holding one angle. Then the free-roam Playground (in the track select) has cones, donut space and no clock. When one angle feels natural, work through the 20 tracks in order; each one teaches one new thing.

Try it now: play free