Building a Fiat Drift Car

Building a FIAT Drift Car - the Pursuit of Lunacy.....By Micheal "megabux" Beck

Part 1

Frankly, I used to find drifting a waste. A wantingly destructive motorsport, marginally edged out in it’s idiocy by NASCAR and county fairgrounds figure-eight races. Purposefully ruining tires and shredding bumpers on cars with build costs eclipsing the price of my house to no real productive conclusion seemed asinine. It’s incredibly difficult for me to admit it most times (ask any of my co-hosts), but I have to swallow my pride, as bitter the medicine may be: drifting is epic. The combination of Gridlife and riding in a drift-spec GTO at an O Drift Collective event at Raceway Park of the Midlands lead to my 180. It is the embodyment of fun that is missing from most motorsports. While I know Formula D is not without it's drama, local events exist purely for the enjoyment of drivers, photographers, and spectators alike. It lacks pedigree, it lacks ego, it lacks entitlement. And I have to do it. Now.

Those of you that listen to our show (Ten Tenths Podcast) are aware that I am in the process of building an 86 RX7 that’s LT1/T56 swapped, but unfortunately it’s not close enough to completion to run this year. While the merging of the two wiring harnesses is quite well documented, the original RX7 wiring harness appears to have been previously owned by by Edward Scissorhands. As a result, much wire tracing needs to occur along with sorting out a tune., so it will continue to sit in the corner of the garage until winter comes when I’ll have time to work on it again.

If I want to try drifting this year, that leaves the previously mentioned FIAT.......and I do plan to drift this year, because I am impatient and a lunatic. I Googled “drift FIAT” and it turns out (surprise) it’s not a thing. I think I’m the only person in the history of the motorsport that thought a 124 COULD potentially drift and the only one stupid enough to try it. I’m not enough of a madman to think it’s going to be a good drift car, but it’s remarkably similar to a Miata and technically makes a bit more power, so I don’t really see what I have to lose.

The Preparation

First thing’s first: the car currently has an open differential. The limited slip for a 124 is an incredibly rare part that costs about $1500. The whole car cost less than a month's rent on a studio apartment in Manhattan and I’m too cheap to feel inclined to drop that much on a diff.   Luckily, there happened to a welded diff sitting on the shelf from a long-disassembled 124 that ran track days eons ago.  Out came the driveshaft, a quick pull of the axles and a swap the diffs. Really quite simple

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The car currently had a fiberglass lip under the wrong grille that houses the front brake duct intakes. Otherwise it performs no real function than to make the car look a bit more aggressive and to make loading it on most trailers exponentially more difficult. Obviously, drifting involves many agricultural excursions and fiberglass doesn’t tend to do well with direct impacts; it had to go.

With the front lip gone, I had originally planned to remove the brake ducts. But again this is drifting: the unofficial motorsport of zipties, so strapping them to the sway bar seemed more appropriate.

I’ve never run a rear sway bar on this car very much. In tight bends it picked up the inside rear tire and spun all the power away. The car only has 140 hp on a good day; I can use all the help I can get. Losing a bit of grip in the rear by lifting a tire could be just what I needed, so the bar was reinstalled.

With the car put back together, I bolted up a set of 5 year old Toyo RA1s to the rear and took the car for a test run to see if it would even spin the rears or if that old, rusty diff was as destroyed as Bobby Brown’s septum. Last year when I ran this exact same setup I was snaking all over over the tight go-kart track we use for time trials; I just couldn’t get the power down and the rear was wanting to step out more times than Tiger Woods.  Thankfully not much had changed and I was able to get the car to step out in second gear… this might just work.

Stay tuned for Part 2 to see if Michael’s Ludacris plan actually pans out…

Michael Beck lives in a world of automotive lunacy. In 2009 when he decided to start autocrossing, he passed on buying a Miata or a CRX and bought an old FIAT 124 with a stuck engine. After somehow successfully turning the old FIAT into a car nearly as fast as a Miata, he decided to build a track day car. Naturally, he bought an old RX7 out of someone’s backyard and through some shady craigslist dealings, acquired a nearly-free LT1 from a police car. Michael is co-host of Ten Tenths Podcast. He likes to tell girls he meets at bars he’s an automotive journalist and photographer.