Yep Nigo was right, sorry for leading you astray but the link I gave you was only the data package. I had forgotten that Matthew only created an AMD64 .deb around release time, and so there is no i386 .deb to go with the data package I told you to install.
Now I tried on Ubuntu Dapper (what I'm running until I have time to upgrade) and the following did not work, because Dapper does not have the same version of SDL as these packages require (they are for Debian unstable I think). Here are the Debian packages for the 2006-10-06 release made by Goneri Le Bouder, a member of the Debian Games team. You'll need at least the i386 binary package, plus the minimal data package at least. If you want to install the full data, then you'll also need the full data package (note: the minimal data package is not optional). You can find these packages here:
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/v/vdrift/
or on any other Debian mirror in a similar location. The files you will need are:
vdrift_0.0.2006.10.06-1_i386.deb
vdrift-minimal_0.0.2006.10.06-1_all.deb
vdrift-full_0.0.2006.10.06-1_all.deb [optional]
To install them use the same command as before but provide all of the files you wish to install.
Code:
sudo dpkg -i vdrift_0.0.2006.10.06-1_i386.deb vdrift-minimal_0.0.2006.10.06-1_all.deb
That would install just the minimal data, add the full package to that for all of it.