yeah, drifting is too good. If you play online, expect to find faggots constantly powersliding all the time, also known as "snaking" when you do it on straightaways. There's so much boost from the powerslides that you'll end up going faster than you would just accelerating normally.
Anyone who tries to justify it and pass it off as something that was "intended" to be in the game is full of shit, as snaking often makes it easy to beat the Nintendo ghosts on time trial stages. Pretty much the only good thing about snaking is that it becomes quite the equalizer against the cheap CPU.