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How to drift: faster laps in Apex Drift
In Apex Drift your score is your fastest lap, and the drift is where laps are won. A good drift does two things at once: it gets you round the corner and it charges your boost for the straight after it.
The controls
On a phone, drag anywhere on the screen to steer: the further you drag, the harder the car turns, so use small nudges for fine corrections. Hold the bottom-right of the screen to brake. On a computer, steer with the left and right arrow keys (or A and D) and brake with the down arrow, S or the space bar.
Brake before the corner, not in it
Do your braking in a straight line just before the turn, then steer in. Braking while already turning hard scrubs speed and pushes the car wide. The tight hairpins need a real stop; the fast bends often need little or no braking.
Hold the drift to charge the boost
Hold a deep turn and the car slides into a drift. While it drifts, the boost bar fills. Ease back out of the turn and the boost fires for a burst of speed.
The trick is timing the release. Let the drift go as the corner opens out, so the boost fires onto the straight rather than into the wall on the exit.
Keep it clean
Clip a wall and you lose the boost you were charging, as well as the speed. A slightly slower drift that stays off the wall is almost always faster over the lap than an aggressive one that touches it.
Drive through every gate. Missing one adds a time penalty, which costs far more than any line you could gain by cutting the corner.
Use the gates to find time
Every gate flashes your time against your best run. Green means you are ahead. Watch which gates turn red: that tells you which corner is costing you, so you can practise that one instead of the whole lap.
How your lap is scored
Your fastest lap in the competition window counts, and identical times split the prizes for the places they share equally. Every race is replayed and checked on our servers before it reaches the leaderboard.