Female drift racers show that they’re tough as nails and can still love the color pink.

Ige-Toshima, 29, who was into off-roading, came into the picture soon after Toyoda and her then driving partner, Yoshie Shuyama, started Drifting Pretty in 2003 to recruit other women into a sport that­—at the barest level—is a style of racing that covets the ability to burn rubber and round the curves of a racetrack with a car angled enough to invoke maximum dramatic visual effect.

“I didn’t want to join a program that’s pretend or just a bunch of girls standing along the sidelines,” said Ige-Toshima, who lives in South Pasadena.

“I studied [Drifting Pretty] for about three months. They were actually out there on the tracks and working on their cars, doing everything themselves, so I thought, ‘All right. They’re not all talk. I’ll join, I’ll learn, and we’ll see where that goes,’” she said.

Ige-Toshima

Three years later, Toyoda and Ige-Toshima, are now heading Drifting Pretty together, and the sisterly bond between the two is refreshing against the backdrop of a daring sport. The girls are so close that they even occasionally finished each other’s sentences during a recent interview with The Rafu Shimpo. Drifting originated in Japan in the 1970s and is now a professionally recognized motorsport that takes some of the conventional wisdom learned in a driver’s education course and throws it out the window.

Losing control of a car, which is frowned upon in everyday driving, is part of the technique required for a successful drift. A car is drifting when its rear slip angle is more pronounced than its front slip angle.  This is, in a sense, allowing the back of your car to swerve out. At the same time, the front wheels of a car should point in the opposite direction of the turn.

To further illustrate this, Ige-Toshima said, “Have you seen the movie, ‘Cars’? Do you remember how [Doc Hudson] says, ‘Turn left to make a right’? It’s like that. So in the middle of a drift, you’re directing where you want your car to go and what you want your car to do, along with giving it gas and other things.”

“There are a lot of things we do to manipulate the car…so not only is it yanking the steering wheel, but we also kick the clutch, yank on the e-brake and press the brake. We lose control, but it’s controlled sliding at the same time,” said Toyoda, whose reputation and abilities landed her a role as a stunt driver in “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.”

“In driver’s ed, you learn that drifting is bad,” she added.
“Yeah! Drifting is bad! That’s why we love it so much,” a laughing Ige-Toshima chimed in.

When the girls stood beside their cars during an evening photo shoot at Pasadena’s Paseo Colorado—Toyoda’s a shimmery pink Nissan 240SX, covered in cherry blossoms and racing decals, and Ige-Toshima’s, a black Nissan 240SX decorated with Hawaiian turtles and racing decals—passersby couldn’t help but do double takes.

“Those girls drive those cars? They race?” asked multiple onlookers.

And it’s true. Toyoda and Ige-Toshima, both recently married, are hardly the large, rough and tough racers one mightexpect to find on a track. But that’s the point. They, along with the other women of Drifting Pretty, are continuously changing the way people view women’s participation in motorsports, with their emboldened femininity and serious hands-on approach to driving and working on cars. Until groups like Drifting Pretty came along, female participation in motorsports was mostly limited to car modeling or riding passenger in boyfriends’ cars.

Toyoda and Ige-Toshima are full of surprises. Aside from being professional award-winning drifters, they are also an accountant for an entertainment company and a former administrative assistant, respectively. Toyoda, who hardly looks her age, is also the mother of a 10-year-old girl named Kristy.

“She loves going to the track,” said Toyoda about Kristy. “She watches the races and, of course, loves watching mommy and hanging out in the pit area. She’ll spend 10 hours with me at the track when I have a practice and will last all 10 hours!”

Since its inception, Drifting Pretty has maintained a membership of anywhere from 10 to 14 girls, according to Toyoda. Girls can join with little to no experience by contacting Ige-Toshima, who acts as the director of admissions for Drifting Pretty.

“I talk to girls about what they’re going to need versus what they want,” Ige-Toshima said. “Once we get onto the track, the first thing we talk about is safety and how your car reacts to certain situations and things your body may or may not do.”

According to Toyoda, a variety of car models and makes can be used to drift, however ideal circumstances call for a rear-wheel-driven car, and preferably, a manual rather than an automatic because “it’s a lot more fun.”

The girls also recommend starting out with an older car.

“With drifting, there’s the danger of crashing,” said Toyoda. “It happens sometimes, but safety is key at the track, so there aren’t a lot of crashes.”

All the same, the girls wear NOMEX (fire resistant) suits and gloves, as well as helmets when they are competitively drifting. Their cars, as in other motorsports, are reinforced with roll cages­—a requirement for driving tandem and for competing in Formula Drift, the largest drifting championship in the United States.

Training days for Drifting Pretty include more than daylong drifting practices. The girls also participate in autocrossing (a temporary course made up of traffic cones that drivers navigate through as quickly as possible), go-karting and road racing (on a windy circuit course).

Participating in different motorsports teaches the girls how to control their cars better, said Toyoda.

“Once you learn the limits of your car, it’s easier to make your car drift since you know when it’s just about to drift,” she said.

“It’s like being an overall athlete,” added Ige-Toshima.

Building on this, the girls of Drifting Pretty do weekly online quizzes about the inner-workings of their cars in addition to attending meetings and frequent how-to sessions. Sometimes sponsors will even open up their shops to the group so the girls can see exactly how the professionals deal with certain parts. For times when the girls aren’t sure about how to fix something, Drifting Pretty also maintains a skilled network of supporters, instructors and mechanics, who are always ready to step in and offer advice and assistance, according to Toyoda, whose own husband is also an accomplished drifter.

“In Drifting Pretty, we teach the girls how to work on their own cars. If you go to the track, you need to change your own wheels. When we see a girl at the track not changing her own wheels, we really look down on that,” she said.

This is what makes Drifting Pretty a serious program that requires commitment. It is structured so that members gain a better understanding of their cars and of motorsports in general.

At competitions drifters are judged on four points: speed, racing line, angle of drift and crowd impact. With speed, judges take note of how quickly drivers enter turns, speed through turns and exit them. The racing line is the fastest way around a track, and judges look to seehow closely drivers follow this line. Angle of drift is judged based on how deep or shallow a car’s angle is during a drift. And lastly, crowd impact (or appeal) is judged on how the audience reacts to a driver’s performance, the amount of smoke that rises from a car’s tires or even just how cool the overall appearance of the drift is.

“It’s like ice skating. It’s very subjective because every judge has a different thing they like,” Toyoda said.

With Christmas just around the corner, Toyoda and Ige-Toshima offered up gift ideas for men shopping for the female drifter or aspiring female drifter in their lives.

“For the budget minded, for the poor guys, if girls are getting into it and you’re tapped out of money, just know, girls like looking good at the track,” said Toyoda.

One after the other, Toyoda and Ige-Toshima listed: racing shoes, nice racing gloves (“Not JCPenney, but like sparkle, real racing NOMEX gloves,” said Toyoda), a really fancy helmet and a limited slip differential (LSD), which attaches to a car’s rear axles, enabling the back tires to spin with equal power, making it easier to drift.

“We say the basics are: You’ve got to have suspension, you’ve got to have LSD or you’re not going to have fun at the track,” Toyoda said.

None of this is really cheap. LSDs, for example, range in price from $250 to $1,500. And as for tires, the girls usually go through a set to a set and a half on a full day of training.

This points to a lesson that some learn quickly: Racing is expensive.

But Toyoda and Ige-Toshima say this shouldn’t deter people from learning how to drift since it doesn’t take much to get started. If you’re serious enough, there’s always a chance of getting sponsored somewhere down the line.

This is what makes drifting so accessible, says Toyoda.

“Anybody can do it. You don’t have to have a sponsor since you can use your own $500 Nissan 240SX and go to the track and drift it yourself,” she said, adding that practices are held monthly. “So, you not only can watch it and have fun watching it, but there are also lots of outlets for people to enjoy drifting behind the wheel.”

To learn more about Drifting Pretty, visit: www.driftingpretty.com.