I am trying to make my car easy to handle at low speeds when the back wheels lose traction. However, I am struggling to find a car setup, model adjustment or helper functions to achieve this.

At the moment, the car creates petals when I try to do doughnuts. i.e. the car starts to move forward, the back slips out and swings wildly 180 degrees and then starts to drive forward again, then slips out again and swings wildly again 180 degrees, etc, etc (skid marks look like flower petals on the ground).

Counter steering, or any steering is very slow to affect the movement of the car. I have played with grip on the tires and suspension and several other things as well as adding helper forces.

I am using Unity and UnityCar physics from the asset store. This is a raycast/slip model. I have written some helper functions that make the car easy to control while drifting around a race track (i.e. Shifting power to front wheels to help control car when in 4 wheel drift, increasing grip when delta slip gets too high, adding angular drag to stop fish tailing), but I just can't crack low speed drift.

I have been working on this for quite a while and have almost got to the point, where I think I might be better off writing my own arcade physics model.

But before I give up, I thought I would reach out to this community to see if anyone has any tips that might get me back on track.

I have made some progress on this problem. I found that adjusting the sideways friction on the tyres is not very effective.

I am making the best progress by applying a lateral helper force to the rear wheels proportional to the current steering input. i.e. if counter steering, the force pushes against the current drift direction.