I've often wondered if drifting came about from somebody watching the incredible skills of offroad rally drivers and wanting to mimic that on asphalt.
But... apparently it didn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drifting_(motorsport)
Japan was one of the birthplaces of drifting as a sport. It was most popular in the All Japan Touring Car Championship races. The famous motorcyclist turned driver, Kunimitsu Takahashi, was the foremost creator of drifting techniques in the 1970s. This earned him several championships and a legion of fans who enjoyed the spectacle of smoking tires. The bias ply racing tires of the 1960s–1980s lent themselves to driving styles with a high slip angle. As professional racers in Japan drove this way, so did the street racers.
Keiichi Tsuchiya, known as the "Drift King" (ドリフトキング Dorifutokingu), became particularly interested by Takahashi's drift techniques. Tsuchiya began practicing his drifting skills on the mountain roads of Japan, and quickly gained a reputation amongst the racing crowd. In 1987, several popular car magazines and tuning garages agreed to produce a video of Tsuchiya's drifting skills. The video, known as Pluspy,[2] became a hit and inspired many of the professional drifting drivers on the circuits today. In 1988, alongside Option magazine founder and chief editor Daijiro Inada, he helped to organize one of the first events specifically for drifting called the D1 Grand Prix. He also drifted every turn in Tsukuba Circuit in Japan.