THIS IS A HILARIOUS STORY….so if you clicked on the blog, keep reading/watching!
To start off, this YouTube video correctly shows how a professional driver would drift….drifting is a maneuver stunt drivers do in competitions.
This video is how a Chinese person would drift in an attempt to cut a cucumber. I thought it was pretty cool and weird at the same time.
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I went to breakfast with my friend CoolHand Luke at the Cracker Barrel….America’s finest breakfast cuisine! I hadn’t seen him in a long time; so it was a good time! His name, CoolHand Luke is appropriate because he is always so chill that ladies certainly call him “cool.” He is more laid back than John Mayer, and even his chillness stresses me out. CoolHand Luke is an audio engineer for a charitable organization here in Birmingham. He told me the following story about a very intelligent family member.
His brother, Driver, had recently gotten into some trouble with his favorite video games in an attempt to make fake worlds come to life. Driver and his best friend, Mack, really love these video games, spending countless hours in front of the television perhaps turning into couch potatoes. They like to reenact some of their favorites as if they are Broadway performances. For instance playing World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWF) stunts on couches and beds is not uncommon for their extracurricular activities and fun. They would leap on trampolines and jump on one another never doing too much damage other than breaking some cheap furniture. They actually thought that entertainment wrestling with Hulk Hogan and The Undertaker was real. Now remember both these boys are sophomores in high school at this point. They have vivid imaginations. They got together on a usual Friday night to play video games as they did most weeks. These guys obviously had busy social lives with lady friends. They were playing one of the hottest street racing games on the market right now, Tokyo Extreme Racer 3, on the Playstation gaming console.
After three hours of excitement on the gaming machine, that was not real enough for them. They had the brilliant idea to drive mother’s 2006 Infiniti G35 Sport Coupe. On the Tokyo Extreme Racer video game, they were enthralled with this idea of drifting the automobile. Drifting involves turning the steering wheel to the left or the right causing the car to move forward sideways. The car moves forward at an angle with its passenger or driver side door facing forward. The driver slightly twists the steering wheel back to its original position to adjust the car so that it is going straight once again. You turn the steering wheel once to twist the car and then turn the steering back in the opposite direction to make it straight. For a better explanation,
Autodrifter.com states that drifting refers “to the difference in slip angle between the front and rear tires of a car. When the rear wheels are slipping at a greater angle than the front wheels, the car is drifting, or oversteering. The rear end of the car appears to chase the front end around a turn, while the front tires control the actual direction of the car.”
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Wikipedia further explains that “drifting refers to a driving technique and to a motorsport where the driver intentionally over steers, causing loss of traction in the rear wheels through turns, while maintaining vehicle control and a high exit speed. A car is drifting when the rear slip angle is greater than the front slip angle prior to the corner apex, and the front wheels are pointing in the opposite direction to the turn (e.g. car is turning left, wheels are pointed right or vice versa), and the driver is controlling these factors. As a motor sport, professional drifting competitions are held across the world.”
Back to the story, leaving the neighborhood was pretty easy in his mother’s Infiniti G35. Driver (an ironic name for a story such as this) remembered an interstate that was close to the house. He figured that would be a good place to build up speed in order to try this video game stunt. At the next ramp with his speed between eighty to ninety miles an hour, he slowly edged the end of the ramp starting to turn the steer ever so slightly to the left. Then he jerked it to the left as the video game depicted. Now remember the video game is engineered by professionals in the sport; so it is totally a realistic source for practice in a fictional world. He was drifting successfully at first and quite happy with his new stunt professional talent. Mack was screaming and singing with excitement over the blaring music with his window rolled down. They just happen to be listening to “We Will Rock You” by Queen. They were rockin’ alright. At this point on the exit ramp the car was moving up the ramp with the passenger side going straightforward. Driver eased the steering wheel back to the right and then jerked it as he did before while turning the car to the left. Typically in this situation the car would then straighten out and a pretty drifting cool maneuver would have occurred as two teenage boys awed at their newfound victory. The car never straightened completely when the steering wheel was jerked to the right. Instead the car’s front axle broke completely. The front bumper of the car was imploding at an angle into the cement ground, causing the front hood to rip off the car. The car was still moving on its side because the attempt to drift correctly failed. The car ran off the side of the road and then flipped upside down landing bottom first into a ditch. Apparently the boys crawled out of the car with a few nicks and bruises because both of them called friends to get rides home. They went home without contacting anyone about what had happened. They left the scene of the accident without much consideration other than “we’ll deal with it tomorrow when it’s not so late.” They both slept fine that night without much thought for what they did wrong….kind of like hibernating bears you might say.
The next morning Driver’s mother called his father to ask if had taken the Infiniti out to run some errands. The answer was obviously no. Driver woke up in an almost-drunken stupor asking his mother what was wrong. She asked where the car was. His eyes got big all of a sudden as if he instantly remembered his Jason Bourne shenanigans last night. He was stuck. After explaining to her the excitement of the video game’s realistic depictions because you know she was thrilled about that (not saying much about how the car was totaled), she quickly took him back to the scene where the cops happen to be waiting. Driver was instantly arrested for leaving the scene of an accident and wreckless driving among two other charges. To say the least he was in a little bit of trouble with the law and stayed in jail for a few days. The state mandated that Driver could not get his official driver’s license until he was eighteen instead of sixteen years old. He had to pay back every cent for the wrecked sports car; it took him over three years to do so. From what I have been told you must have an all-wheel (four-wheel-drive vehicle sports car) to actually drift to make the complete rotation back to the original car position. That was Driver’s first mistake, or maybe even just thinking about the stunt was his first mistake. Having a two wheel drive vehicle would not successfully turn the car back around. In other words, when he jerked the car back to the left he was fine. Then when he jerked the car to the right to straighten back out it was all over. The car was obviously not made to do that, and he needed all four wheels rotating on the pavement simultaneously to complete the maneuver. Perhaps the moral of the story is not to take video games too seriously; they are all fake! Perhaps more importantly do not practice the auto art of drifting if you are not a professional. Thankfully no one was hurt because Driver was obviously able to sleep on it in his own bed the night that the accident occurred.
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These are some more videos of car accident that took place from cars drifting. In the last video, one of the cars knocks over a person who at the end of the accident is okay. I will let you decide whether that stunt was funny or not along with the other wrecks. Hopefully no one was hurt.
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WARNING DISCLAIMER: I am not suggesting that anyone who reads this blog entry should try driving in the manner shown in these videos or described in this story. DO NOT try any of these stunts yourself! A video game is not real! A wreck might occur. Only competitive professional drivers are capable of such tricks.
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