If you take a drive on the motorways of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, you'll notice a lot of luxury cars — going very fast. Seeing drivers speed through crowded neighborhoods and aggressively overtake one another on the freeways of Iraq is not new, but I had heard rumors of a group taking things more seriously than driving quickly in traffic: They were illegally racing and drifting on city streets at night. I brushed it off as a few guys having fun at night and rich kids showing-off their dad’s car, until I received an invitation to attend a formal drifting competition — the largest of its kind in northern Iraq — to be held on the city's outskirts in late April. The event was something entirely different than what I had imagined.