We're not a general hobby shop that happens to have a drift section. RC drifting is all we do, and we do it because we drive it ourselves, every week, on a track we built with our own hands.
Drift Manji RC is run by me, Wayne, and my partner Nichola, from a unit on Valley Road Business Park in Liversedge, West Yorkshire. It started as a track. The shop came later, and only because the people at the track needed things we could get for them.
Back in 2016 I fell down a YouTube hole watching RC crawling. I went along to a local RC shop that had a small indoor crawler track, walked through the door, and there was a full RC drift track with cars going round in tandem. That was it. I never did buy a crawler.
My first car was an HPI Sprint 2, back when everything was 4WD and counter steer. I had it about four or five months before manufacturers started producing 1/10 RWD drift cars, and I picked up an MST RMX 2.0 to learn the rear wheel drive side of things.
I've still got that RMX. Nine years on, rebuilt and changed beyond recognition, and it's still my go to car.
For years I drove at an indoor track in Normanton. Great place, great atmosphere, and a proper group of regulars. Then we were told it was closing after a rent increase.
That hit harder than it probably should have for a hobby. We'd all found somewhere to go, somewhere to switch off for a few hours a week with people who got it. I told the lads I'd try to find us somewhere else.
At the time I was working as a commercial electrician for a company that owned a lot of industrial property. I asked them whether they had anything suitable, and they mentioned the unit we're in now, a building I'd actually done electrical work in eight years earlier, empty ever since.
We got the keys in 2018. It was four separate offices, so the walls came through to open the space up. New ceilings levelled out, new lighting, new sockets, and then a track to build from nothing.
My dad did a huge amount of the work, along with family and friends, and all of it happened around my day job. Four or five months from keys to first session. It's never really finished, we're still changing things now.
When I started, every indoor RC drift track in this country was carpet, sprayed with silicone oil to make it slippery enough to drift on. Grip changed depending on how recently it had been treated, how much had been sprayed, and where on the track you were. There was one polished concrete surface in the UK at the time and that was it.
Meanwhile the footage coming out of Japan showed people drifting on mall floors and shop floors, epoxy resin. It looked consistent in a way carpet never was. I thought something had to change here.
So we tested. Single pack resins, two pack resins, one after another until we found the mix that's down today. Then we did it all again with tyre compounds, because nothing on the market had been developed for a surface like this. There was nothing to copy. It took the whole scene a while to adjust. Final drive ratios had to come up from around 7-8 to 12-13 before the cars felt right. We were all learning something nobody here had driven before.
It's still the only epoxy resin RC drift surface in the UK.
There was never a plan to become a hobby shop. The track was meant to be a community space, somewhere to drive, talk rubbish, and get away from everything else for a few hours.
After a year or so I started stocking a few bits for the regulars. Wheels, our compound tyres, pinions, a couple of tool sets. That was the entire range.
Then the pandemic shut us for twelve months. We had stock sat doing nothing and bills that didn't stop, so we opened an eBay store to keep money coming in and keep the track alive. A year or so after that we built our own website. That's how we got from a few sets of tyres on a shelf to what you're looking at now.
We get asked this a lot. I went through a lot of names before this one stuck.
Drift, because that's all we do. Manji, after the drift manoeuvre, the symbol it takes its name from is also associated in Buddhism with practising day and night, which felt about right for how much time we were putting in. RC, because that's the scale we're at.
I left school and went straight into a garage as a mechanic for about five years, then into auto body repair, which is where I learned to paint and repair bodywork. I've been around cars my whole life and that isn't changing.
So when you order from us:
Not the numbers. It's watching what the place means to the regulars, how much a few hours on a Thursday can matter to someone having a rough time of it. That's the bit that keeps us going when the admin piles up.
And selfishly: I've managed to turn the thing I'm most passionate about into a business. Not many people get to say that.
The track runs every Thursday from 5:15pm and on the last Saturday of every month from 12:30pm. No booking, just turn up. Full details on the track page.
New to RC drifting? Start with our beginner's guide, or have a look at drift chassis kits and RTR cars - tell us your budget and we'll put something sensible together.
