Igora Drive (Игора Драйв)

Circuit · Russia, Leningrad Oblast

Winter rounds. RDS GP's northern home.

4.086 km in Leningrad Oblast, an hour north of Saint Petersburg. Opened in 2019; the FIA Grade 1 facility holds RDS GP rounds and is one of the few modern drift venues that runs winter events with sub-zero ambient temperatures and snowbank walls.

For drift specifically Igora Drive matters because of how it changes the engineering question. Cold-weather drift, what the tires want, how the chassis behaves on a tarmac surface in -10°C, how oil pressure looks at the bottom of a high-power slide, is a separate technical discipline. Igora rounds force the RDS field to demonstrate it.

The aesthetic is unlike anywhere else on the drift calendar. Snowflake-blue grandstands, white-out backgrounds when the weather closes, breath-fog from the crew chiefs in the pits. The footage from Igora is the closest drift broadcast gets to feeling like a winter motorsport.

Source: Leh-a · CC BY-SA 4.0