Drifting is a style of racing or driving.
Basicly in drifting the car slides around sideways around a corner. The Japanese are crazy about this style of racing. In the orthodox racing, you brake before you enter the turn, and you try and cross at the apex (or not, it just depends on the radius of the curve). Hence, the need for hard braking (brake later, accelerate sooner). With drifting, the car is sliding around the apex; there is less emphasis on a distinct "braking phase", and more an emphasis on changing the atbreastude of the car (the direction the car is travelling vs. the direction the car is pointing) with braking and throttle manipulation.
In rally racing drifting is a common technique- alot of it just comes from driving on slipper surfaces where high speed + sharp turns will make sliding inevitable, so it's more about learning to control the sliding, than actively producing a slide. Since FWD and AWD cars are common in rally racing, the handbrake is often used in especially tight turns to induce some oversteer.
For real world driving, drifting is too dangerous, it requires alot of speed to drift and the possibility of losing control of the car is much greater than with a regular turn.
