The first rule of drifting is, there are no rules. The second rule of drifting is . . . Hold up, stall the engine – wrong movie. There are, in fact, many rules in drifting. Back to the starting grid we go. “Do it fast, do it furious.” That’s better. The Fast and the Furious. What do you mean, which one? There are 11 Fast and the Furious movies? Ah here. And not one of them a patch on Herbie Goes Bananas. Anyway, to business. I’m a drifter now. To be fair, some old schoolteachers warned years ago that was to be my lot, a life spent wandering between odd jobs here and there. Drifting along.On, Wednesday their hunch came to pass. Spending the afternoon wrestling a car, trying to persuade it to travel sideways, at high speed and in the rain, is undeniably odd. But completely exhilarating. And it beats working.The Red Bull Drift Masters Ireland Grand Prix takes place at Mondello Park this Saturday and Sunday – the third of seven rounds across Europe.The sport of drifting is no longer an underground sub-culture. Indeed, car culture is a multi-billion euro global behemoth – and within that, drifting is one of the world’s fastest growing motorsports.Conor Shanahan at Mondello Park, Co Kildare. Shanahan, from Cork, is the reigning Drift Masters champion. Photograph: Paddy McGrath/Red Bull Content Pool Cork’s Conor Shanahan, who only celebrated his 23rd birthday during the week, is the reigning Drift Masters champion. His brother Jack also competes, while another star of the sport is fellow Corkonian James Deane – a Rebel with a cause. Even Olympian Thomas Barr is a drifting enthusiast. Turns out Ireland has no shortage of drifters. To certain teachers, that will come as little surprise.Organisers are expecting in the region of 25,000 to pass through the gates at Mondello Park in Co Kildare this weekend.“Drifting is very viewer-friendly and very exciting,” says Shanahan. “We all grew up watching cars and the unlimited era of WRC and the unlimited era of F1 and stuff like that. The louder it was, the more exciting it was, that’s what made a lot of my generation fall in love with cars.“With drifting, it’s a very exciting sport because you get to sit down in one place and watch basically the whole event from start to finish.”Drifting is not your typical motorsport event where the first driver across the finish line wins. It’s a judged sport, where cars are rated on certain criteria including their racing line, angle, style and speed. There is also a 1v1 drift battle.Conor Shanahan burns rubber during the sixth stop of the Drift Masters European Championship in Madrid, Spain, on May 17. Photograph: Jaanus Ree “The chase car has to mirror exactly what the lead car is doing through the run without making contact and basically go as close as they can to them,” explains Shanahan.But as in all sports, some participants go down easier than others at the first hint of contact.“Yeah, I guess on the technical side there will be drivers who will turn into soccer players very easily, so you don’t want to touch them too hard.”This weekend, Shanahan’s goal is to win on Irish soil and stay on track to retain the title he collected in front of 50,000 spectators in Poland last September.In advance of the event, we got the opportunity to experience the sport for ourselves – first to drive a custom-built 280bhp Nissan 350Z drift car in Mondello and then to be a passenger in the same vehicle with Shanahan at the wheel. The double world champion, sitting in the passenger seat, seemed genuinely awestruck by our slick moves. Sick, I should say. Seemed genuinely sick at our awful moves. Apologies, it’s hard to type accurately on this rigid keyboard again when you’ve felt the power of a hydraulic handbrake in your clenched fist. Okay, full disclosure – drifting is difficult and we may have spent much of our driving time pirouetting slowly like a three-legged tortoise unable to figure out how exactly to move forward. Or in our case, sideways. So, round and round we went.Doing limp doughnuts, it turns out, is easy. So too is oversteering, understeering, using too much power, using too little power, braking too late and braking too early.Most of the drifting advice rails against all your natural instincts. The instructions go something like this – approaching a corner, pull down hard on the handbrake and hold for three seconds, during which time the back wheels are completely locked.Then release the steering wheel so it spins violently as the car figures out what direction it wishes to travel, before grabbing the wheel again and pumping the accelerator hard to increase speed and grip in order to drift sideways through the corner. Simples. Gordon Manning is a picture of concentration on his drifting debut at Mondello Park Shanahan tried hurling and soccer as a kid too, but coming from a family steeped in motorsport – his mam and dad both raced – meant the grunt of an engine proved too loud to ignore.“I fell in love with the idea of drifting because for me, it kind of blew my mind as a kid, being like, ‘Jeez, is this legal? I’m flat-out sideways on a track.’ And the buzz that you get, it’s hard to explain.”When we swapped seats, Shanahan pulled on his Red Bull-emblazoned helmet. For the battle demonstration we were about to experience, the Mallow native said he would only be going at around 60-70 per cent. I was about to mention I’d only gone about 60 per cent myself moments earlier but Shanahan sharply pumped the clutch, hit the accelerator and as the car thrust forward I was flung backwards, plastered to the seat. Imagine the force on your body when a plane takes off and now visualise experiencing that while the car you are in is sliding sideways (drifting) and there is a paperclip separating you and another car also travelling sideways alongside. If the windows were open, I could have tapped on the helmet of the other driver. I’m not sure why you would ever want to do that, but it did occur to me as easily achievable.But then our car snapped left, followed by an immediate lurch to the right and magically the other vehicle disappeared beneath a haze of rain and wheel spray. Only for it to suddenly reappear again a couple of inches from our front bumper – like some sort of jump scare scene in a horror movie. It was sliding sideways towards us and we were aquaplaning straight in its direction. And then the car was gone again. Vanished. But we were now sideways. What sorcery is this?At one point the front of our car seemed to gently rub the door of the other. I can’t be sure because my eyes were closed but my world champion driver gave a little yelp of excitement. It was one of those “woo-hoo, that was a close one” kind of yelps. The whole experience was thrilling; a reckless, adrenaline-filled white-knuckle ride triggering an array of involuntary giddy expletives.Shanahan’s car handling is extraordinary. You’d back him to park an SUV in the Dáil bike shed without so much as ruffling the handle-bar tassels on Micheál Martin’s BMX. Gordon Manning keeps his car on course at Mondello Park How exactly drivers can complete the mirror dance of drifting centimetres apart without colliding almost defies logic. There’s no doubt the fourth movie in The Fast and the Furious franchise, Tokyo Drift, helped bring more eyes to the sport. In April, on the night before Shanahan was to race in Long Beach, one of the film’s stars arranged an underground carpark event for drift vehicles.“Sung Kang from Tokyo Drift was there,” recalls Shanahan. “The police had to shut down the city around the underground carpark. I’m talking 50-60,000 people, there were people climbing barriers trying to get in. It was insane.”When we’d finished, I mentioned to Conor that I thought he was very good at this driving-cars-sideways business. You could tell the words clearly meant a lot to him. Game recognises game, after all. I joked in the changing room later that a group of drifters should really get together and record a version of Under the Boardwalk. The quip landed with the heart-sinking thud of a stalled engine. Somebody finally broke the awkward silence by saying it might actually be difficult to get clearance to drift under a boardwalk. “Oh, undoubtedly,” I agreed, all the while nodding like a dashboard bobblehead poodle with its tail between its legs. But back home, my street cred with the 10-year old is now at an all-time high. He sees himself as some sort of Mario Kart Yoda – an expert at drifting through Toad’s Turnpike, picking up coins and tossing shells at unsuspecting racers.But if he knows how to drift in that pixelated world, his dad has real-world kudos now. The Fast and the Furious: Mondello Drift. Completed it, kid.