Drifting is often seen as a measure of epicness and the longer you can hold it, the more epic you are seen to be. It’s not the rarest of skills in the car world, but among those who take it to another level, a new Drift King has emerged. A man in South Africa, a motoring scribe by the name of Jesse Adams, held a drift for nearly six hours to claim the Guinness World Record, in a Toyota GT86.
We are well aware of how serious and pedantic the people of Guinness World Records are about handing out these titles, so here’s what they classify as a drift. According to their premise for the record, the driven wheels are not allowed to stop spinning at any time during the attempt. A change of direction is allowed as long as the driven wheels stay in motion and if said wheels stop at any point, the run would be considered null and void. This means that as long as good ol’ Jesse had his foot planted and tyres spinning, even if he span out, he’d still be drifting. Now, we know we’d all probably like to see a single, continuous, dizzying drift, but that does not make this any less impressive of a feat.
Jesse ran his record-breaking drift, five hours and forty-six minutes long, around the Gerotek Testing Facility in South Africa, just west of Pretoria. He covered a distance of 168.502 kilometres, or a thousand laps of the skidpan with an average speed of 29kph per lap. Deduct the spinouts and incomplete laps and it’s a total of 952. That’s a LOT of drifting.
The previous record was set by a German by the name of Harald Muller, whose weapon of choice was also a GT86, and covered a total drift distance of 144.126km.
The Auto Loons 