![]() ![]() This is a ground up, fully custom motorsport build more akin to the current crop of World Rally Cars. Let’s start with the obvious this isn’t your ordinary BMW drift car and you definitely won’t find it trying to perform a sketchy half-lap of a roundabout outside your local McDonald’s. This is his 2020 competition car, and arguably his best car yet, his 2019 Drift Masters European Championship winning Falken Tyres BMW E92 Eurofighter, refreshed for 2020. Since 2017 alone, he has won every championship he has entered in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, in three different cars. The Irishman is undoubtedly top of the drifting world at the moment, and has been for some time. If there’s anyone that knows how to build a competitive professional drift car, it’s almost certainly James Deane. If you’re too brave, you’ll either run out of tyres after the first run or end up in the wall. Play it too safe and your rivals will leave you in their smoke. If it seems that a current pro-level drift car needs to be balanced on a knife edge of performance and reliability, then you would be right. That means building a relatively robust car that’s easy to work on while still being faster than its rivals, and also ensuring reliability. There’s still a lot of horsepower involved, but there’s a lot more consideration for building a car with the best possible chance of winning. To have witnessed the evolution of the sport, drivers and their vehicles over the better part of the last 20 years has been something to behold.įrom street cars to the horsepower wars of the 2010s, we’ve now reached a point where the cars are potentially the best they can currently be. There are countless international championships today, and drifting at the highest level has evolved into a formidable form of motorsport featuring massive audiences, huge sponsorship deals and levels of testing and car development comparable with other forms of top level motorsport. Twin battles featured a staggered start, so the cars wouldn’t get too close to each other. A car with more than 300-horsepower was considered to be another world of performance as most made do with significantly less than that. There were no roll cages, race suits, HANS devices, Nomex underwear or fire suppression systems, although helmets were mandatory. There were no real safety regulations in those days. I attended those first events where competitors would arrive in their own street cars, compete, and then drive home again. I’m fortunate enough to have been involved in drifting since the very early days in Europe. Even describing drifting as a ‘sport’ will almost certainly raise an eyebrow or two amongst some of you… Whether that is a positive or negative reaction, will be down to your own experiences with the sport. Today, drifting will almost certainly illicit some sort of pre-conception from most people in the car tuning world. We check out the 2JZ E92 drift car you see here, driven by the one and only James Deane.įeature first appeared in Fast Car. We’ve long since moved past a time where drifting was that new, niche motorsport that only a small audience knew about. ![]()
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