A new Guinness World Record for ‘Fastest Drift’ has been set after Japanese Drifting Series champion Kawabata Masato got into a MY16 Nissan GT-R (1,380-horsepower) and whipped it around at a speed of 189.49mph (304.96 Km/h). Just consider for a moment that no NASCAR has run 200mph in Talladega qualifying since way back in 1987, and the average green flag speed at Daytona (in 2014) was just a hair over 189mph. So this dude was out there DRIFTING at the highest speeds NASCAR drivers hit while racing.
How that car didn’t flip over and roll ten thousand times across the track is beyond me. Driver Kawabata Masato entered the drift at a speed of 189.49mph and went into a 30-degree drift at Japan’s Fujairah International Airport, successfully setting a new Guinness World Record for ‘fastest drift’ by wrestling that record away from Jakub Przygoński of Poland. The previous record sat at just over 135mph, so this was an absolutely shattering of Przygoński’s world record.
Typically when a world record is torn to shreds like that the new world record stands for quite some time. The flip side of that is that when a world record gets a lot of press (like this one) all the entrepreneurs of the world want to get in there and attempt to break that world record because they then in turn get free press. So it’s hard to say if this record will stand for a while or not.
(h/t GrindTV)