Why is RC drifting taking America by storm? RC drifting has a different vibe. It’s not about racing where everybody’s trying to be first and run everybody else off the road. It’s about driving together. It’s about driving in sync and tuning similarly so that you can match speeds and get your car door to door in the turns. Even during competitions, after some of the best runs, I’ve seen the two drivers who are competing high five each other afterwards because they had such a great run together and they both did a great job. The whole mood is different. Everybody wants to teach each other how to tune and how to drive better. It attracts a different breed of driver. There is a lot more harmony. It’s very peaceful and Feng Shui, like energy flowing through wind and water.
As we launch DARC magazine at the highest point that I’ve seen in American RC drifting since I began in 2013, I want to take a second and tell everybody what this magazine is about. When we first started RC drifting, no one really knew how to do it. I was getting bad advice from a lot of people.
Then I started meeting some people that had some good advice. We had meetups in each other’s garages. I saw that it was going to be a growing hobby in America, but the one thing that was missing was a community to teach everybody about it.
A forum was created in the Facebook group page “Drift America RC Drift Movement”. We also started importing drift parts and chassis from overseas and teaching everybody who was interested how to set their car up. It’s definitely a test of patience and engineering to set up a drift car. These days you can buy a car and build it out of the box and it’s pretty much set up already. But when we started, there were a lot of modifications that needed to be done.
It’s important to note that when we first started, everybody was all wheel drive, otherwise known as “countersteer (CS)”. There was a lot more focus on scale, detail, and realism. Everybody wanted their car to look cool on the track. Rear-wheel drive (RWD) came around and everybody realized that they could be a lot more precise with it. Now RWD is all anybody wants to do.
We want to talk about some of the old school practices and builds that we all had because we feel like a lot of that is getting lost in the shuffle. So while we will be talking about what’s new and exciting in the hobby, we will also be reminding everybody of where it came from and that there’s still a lot more cool stuff out there.
We expect this magazine to reach newcomers as well as old school drivers and seasoned competitors. DARC Mag is for everyone who wants to be a part of the RC Drift hobby.

- Stephen Platt
Founder, DARC Mag