Sara Choi: "When you start drifting, you lose fear of death"

Coinciding with the Y2K revival, drifting and JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) cars have resurfaced in waves of visual hype. But for professional drifter Sara Choi, drifting is more than an aesthetic stunt for JDM-inspired editorials or aspirational TikTok edits. It’s a lived practice grounded in repetition and discipline—training her body and fine-tuning her drift-spec cars with trial runs and engine work.Based in Los Angeles and Japan, Choi keeps the deeper codes of the culture alive and competes across Asia and Southeast Asia, attending car meets, modifying cars, and sharing the process online. Choi sees drifting as both a lifestyle and a community built on daily commitment. She recently expanded into grip racing by joining Japanese team Sunriseblvd, while also developing her own brand, Badseki.

Choi’s venture into drifting emerged out of a rebellious teenage phase, on the H1, H2, and H3—Oahu’s freeways in Hawaii. Centered around a navy exchange center, car enthusiasts and the military would gather in meetups of 200 to 300 cars. Around 2012, before Instagram really took off, they would hand out paper maps and message routes. She landed her first job at a tuning shop, where her boss helped her buy a Honda Civic EK Coupe that she paid off paycheck by paycheck and raced against other slow cars.

She cycled through several Honda models until she moved to Osaka where she got immersed in the drifting scene. Nearly a decade later, she shifted from street racing to international competitions and cultivated a strong interest in the intersection of car culture with fashion and music.

Cyana-Djoher Hadjali: Over the past few years, there’s been a surge of interest in the automotive industry and motorsports—especially in the creative spheres and now in fashion. Has this crossover impacted the car scene?

Sara Choi: The car scene is very similar to fashion. We have a lot of brands, from body kits that represent “clothes” to wheels that are our cars’ “shoes,” all with their own history and rankings—some wheels can go over $15k, for instance. But for some reason, a lot of drivers and car enthusiasts spend so much time and attention on their cars that they end up dressing poorly.

Of course, there’s a beauty in coming out of your car with your typical t-shirt, khaki pants, and flip-flops. It makes the culture what it is: it goes beyond driving, you tune your car, attend car meets, and talk with other enthusiasts and drivers. You also accumulate a lot of knowledge in mechanics. In the scene, your car is your identity marker in a way, and there are many layers to it from street racing to more professional settings and competitions.

But personally, I think aesthetics matter. Fashion is aesthetics, automotive is aesthetics, and a lot of it has been merging these days. I’d like to be a part of pushing fashion onto car enthusiasts, that would be the goal with my brand Badseki.

CDH: Motorcycles make the drivers hyper-visible, and fashion plays a bigger role in that culture, since, as you said, it’s easy to hide inside your car. Do you think that’s where the main difference between the two cultures stems from? 

SC: It depends. The car scene is so big. There are a lot of purists, hardcore enthusiasts who don’t necessarily care. I think fashion is not a big concern for them because their cars get all the sponsors and marketing. But then there are others who lean towards aesthetics more—in music, photography, and so on. It’s happening a lot more with TikTok and Instagram these days. But we all have a common passion. The car remains the main object of attention.

CDH: Do you think subcultures are still thriving today? Are new ones forming through social media?

SC: I think the peak of the “car hype” is slowly decreasing now, at least mostly with JDM it is, but yes. The last three years, everybody has been using JDM cars, especially in hip hop music videos. It started this whole subculture, the “takeover” scene. You know, when people shut down an intersection or a parking lot and do donuts or drift or burnouts. It was a double-edged sword: it created more exposure and hype to the whole tuning scene, but it also reduced it to a purely visual and image-based tool, to be used as a personal brand.

Parts-wise, we’re also losing a lot of knowledge about why some Work wheels are so rare and expensive, or how each body kit has a history to it. People tend to look at JDM cars as a whole piece, something to maximize the “cool” factor.

What I hope doesn’t happen is that some historical brands die out because they don’t get any love anymore. It seems that any kits or wheels will do for TikTok enthusiasts who hopped on the JDM bandwagon and aren’t really educated about real parts. They don’t really care whether it’s fake or original. While it still makes the cars fit within the JDM aesthetic, it ruins the culture in my opinion.

CDH: The culture and its subcultures also expanded through print with magazines like Champion Road for bōsōzoku, Car Graphic, and some shows like JDM Insider. They were valuable sources of knowledge and remain so. Is it harder now to have access to authentic sources, car parts, or models?

SC: A lot of cars, especially from the 1990s and 2000s, are getting more expensive and rare. Obviously, a lot have crashed since that time. What is not that easy to access today are some discontinued engines, like the 2JZ engines, whose prices skyrocketed. There are a lot of archives, a lot of people who own a JDM car, but I would say that the hardest part is getting into the scene and not the material aspect. For drifting, the events are accessible and it’s easy to start drifting, but to really be tapped into the scene and the community, you can’t force it. The process is organic.

CDH: JDM successfully managed to export itself outside of Japan, but it’s still not widespread across the car scene. Is there a specific cartography to drifting?

SC: I think there is. There are specificities to each place and it’s interesting to notice the cultural differences. For instance, they have their own culture in Southeast Asia, and it blends with drifting in a very specific way.

In Korea, it’s practically illegal to have modified cars. Drifters and car enthusiasts still found ways to build a drift scene and tune cars anyway, but the government only allows domestic manufacturers like Hyundai and Kia. They have to settle to drift with limited access to brands and aftermarket pieces, and that’s how it became its own unique thing.

Even though there are many subcultures—from the East Coast style, JDM, and Japan drifting style to Southeast Asia’s drifting style where the aesthetic of the car doesn’t play much of a role—at the end of the day, everyone likes the same thing.

Generally speaking, I think there is no wrong way of drifting or of building drift-spec cars because it depends on so many aspects or economic factors. I do have my opinion on the preferred, right way of drifting in certain situations and styles, but then it gets a bit too long and hard to explain.

CDH: Do you get emotionally attached to your car or does detachment come organically with drifting?

SC: Well, I don’t grip drive my Honda S2000, for instance. I wouldn’t risk it. For my drift cars, I’m blessed to be sponsored. A few years ago, I built my Mazda RX-7 for a show I was filming. I am lucky to have less financial attachment to it. But in general, it’s impossible when you’re drifting to keep that mindset. You should be crashing here and there. That’s the only way to become a better driver.

For me, drifting is always about starting stock [i.e. factory condition cars] and slowly educating yourself. You can’t really cheat by buying all the parts first and then jumping in. If you start with a $20,000 car, not only are you financially attached to it, but you also miss the process of tuning—adding, swapping, and understanding the utility of each part. It’s a whole process rather than just a performance.

I think I fell in love with drifting specifically because every driver has their own drifting style. It’s always singular. You can tell who’s more aggressive, clean cut, and who’s more timid but has moments of aggression. Everyone has their own fashion or style to it.

In contrast, grip driving or F1 are performance-oriented—everyone has the same line, and has to have the same style and footwork. Driving-wise, there’s more expression and style in drifting. This gets translated in the build of the car. Every engine, every chassis has a different feel. The car also tells you how it needs to be driven.

CDH: Today, cars are less about individuality than utility. They’ve become tools for transfers and convenience. Outside of status tokens and race cars, their design has been homogenized. But racing and drifting break that pattern, they’re more about expression and speed. Do you see drifting as a kind of disruption to that?

SC: I do, and I do believe it’s also beneficial to disrupt the mind. Drifters are kind of mentally disturbed. When you start drifting, you lose your fear of death, and you defy your autopilot safety mechanisms. I mean, you have to. When you get close to the wall, for instance, you want to go faster, and you emergency-brake [pulling the handbrake to lock up the rear wheels, which breaks traction, initiates or adjusts drift]at the very last second. But in regular driving, you anticipate braking, and you start 10 seconds prior. It rewires a lot of connections in the brain. It’s a grounding practice in a way; you have to be so locked in and so anchored in the present. The minute you’re scared of commitment or have any anxiety about crashing, then you end up self-sabotaging.

It trains you to let go of old triggers. It forces you to work through a lot of control issues or anxieties and to unlearn negative pathways.Drifting is all about commitment. If you don’t commit, it shows; and either the car or the tracks will let you know. Drifting teaches to focus 100 percent on your lines because if you crash there’s no coming back. So, it disturbs the natural flow of your thoughts, your sense of safety, and rationality. It’s more intuitive. It comes with its own mindset.

CDH: Does this commitment and inner work also project onto the community and how you navigate the egos?

SC: Contrary to the entertainment industry or other creative industries like music or fashion, there’s little to no social climbing in the community. Everybody shares the same passion and directs their spending towards it. So, I would say there’s an increased sense of personal commitment. Of course, it can get pretty materialistic and narcissistic, since there are egos attached to cars.

It’s also a male-dominated industry. But I think that’s unfortunately the case in every industry. I used to try to mirror the energy I would receive but it put me in a very masculine headspace and somehow in survival mode. Now, I adopt alternative strategies. I’m leaning towards being authentic and shifting my focus from this. Overall, I feel blessed to be in the industry. I drift, I build cars, and I get to enter more competitions.