Because automakers enjoy pointless spitting contests and have the resources to participate, we get things like BMW’s specially developed method to refuel a car during an eight-hour world-record drift. But not everything went smoothly, and the more refuels they did, the more the cars smacked into each other.
Guinness World Record? Eh, alright, congratulations. Cars smacking into each other? Now we’re talking.
BMW teased its mid-drift refueling a few days ago, in hinting to everyone that the company reclaimed its former world record for the longest straight “drift” in an eight-hour attempt with driving instructor Johan Schwartz. (Jalopnik’s Raphael Orlove calls this “doing a donut” and insists that it is “NOT drifting,” but still, this guy drove in a sideways circle for eight hours. It’s commendable.)
The last time BMW had the record for world’s longest drift was in 2013, when Schwartz went 51.3 miles in an M5. Toyota went out in both 2014 and 2017, recording more than 89.5 miles the first time and 102.5 miles the second.
But BMW wanted to show those records up and put a show on while doing it, so it assigned people to come up with special devices and a new method for refueling the car while in the middle of the drift—taking away the need to stop or add a ton of extra space to the fuel tank. That required another car to drift up to the world-record car and then drift alongside it, filling the car with 15 to 18 gallons of fuel in less than a minute before letting it take back off.
The company perfected that wild plan, and set Schwartz up to go out in another M5 and get the world record all over again. The actual refueling process looks a lot more intense than expected, and BMW has all five refuels on video here:
Schwartz beat the record this time with a 232.5-mile drift (or whatever you want to call it), more than doubling the existing record and beating his first attempt in 2013 by more than 181 miles. Now that he’s done that, we at Jalopnik cannot wait for the next automaker to come along and create a silly new method to keep a car refueled for precisely 10 hours and 13 minutes in order to beat him.
Hopefully that silly new method will be even more intense than this one was, or at least feature laser beams and disco balls in some capacity.