Drifting for dads, daughters, dates and dreamers – without the danger

[SINGAPORE] I have never wanted to impress a woman with my driving more than when I was behind the wheel of a classic Mazda RX-7, sliding it around the top floor of a multi-storey carpark mere millimetres from the walls, as if I were gunning for a spot in the Drifting Hall of Fame.

But then the woman in question, Gladys Lam, races cars (by actually driving them, not by seeing if she can sprint faster than one), and I was actually piloting a drift kart that she had helped design.

Lam is the co-founder of Dorifto!, an indoor drift experience that opened at the Velocity @ Novena Square carpark annexe on Thursday (Apr 16).

She competes in the PT Maxnitron Racing Series, a prominent motorsport series in Thailand. Last season, she pushed the brake pedal to the floor to zero-effect during the frantic first corner scramble at the start of a race, and went hard into the barriers. Just weeks later, she was on the top step of the podium.

While Lam is the sort of serious racer whose focused stare could open an oyster at 60 paces during race weekends, in lighter moments she laughs like a two-stroke engine. It seems only natural that she would find a way to dovetail her love of competitive driving with an experience designed for maximum hilarity.

What lends uniqueness to Dorifto! (a Japanese transliteration of “drift”) is its cel-like atmosphere, inspired by Initial D, a Japanese manga and anime from the 1990s.

It features a teenage tofu delivery boy who becomes a legendary mountain road racer by sliding his father’s Toyota AE86 through hairpins at terrifying speed on a touge (pronounced “toe gay”), a narrow winding mountain road.

It spawned a Jay Chou movie and introduced a generation of Singaporeans to the art of drifting, and to a fantasy landscape that Dorifto! offers a way to step into.

Lam and her team transformed the 14,000-square-foot area on Level 6A of the carpark into a Japanese touge streetscape complete with forest murals, road signs, a petrol kiosk and, of course, the tofu shop that’s featured in Initial D. 

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They brought in 20 karts styled after the RX-7 and AE86, two icons of Japanese motoring immortalised by the manga. The designs belong entirely to Dorifto!, who commissioned the moulds to produce them.

“There’s no one else in the world that has this design because we made it. We drew it,” said Lam proudly, adding that they have safety bumpers and speed limiters, possibly because she knew I was coming down to have a go. “Everything that we designed, the keyword was just safety, safety, safety.”

The karts have a single trolley wheel at the back, which is what makes them so easy to drift.

Pricing starts at S$23 for an eight-minute session, and children can get behind the wheel as long as they are at least seven years old and 1.2 metres tall. Lam said she already has bookings for birthday parties, although when it comes to drift karts it is not always possible to tell whether it’s the children or adults who enjoy it more.

Dorifto! began with some coffeeshop talk. Post-Covid, Lam and her partners – a five-person group comprising three members of her racing team and two investors – started asking how a drift experience could possibly work here.

They shopped the idea around and UOL Group came up with the idea of using surplus carpark space at Novena Square.

To see what the touge concept could look like, Lam and gang commissioned a 3D mock-up from a freelancer for under S$100. “When the 3D render came out, we were like, oh my god!” she said. “It actually got the vibes.”

It took roughly six months and a sum of S$300,000 to secure the venue and to be ready for the big opening.

Lam – who once interned at The Business Times’ art department – said she handles “everything creative”.

“I really wanted it to be for everybody,” she said. “All my friends who have no drivers’ licence, all the girls who think they cannot drive, (and) even children,” she said with the gleam of someone who has just found her true calling.