Car crazes

Top car crazes from around the globe

It’s head first as we try some of the most amazing car crazes on earth...

Auto Express Car Reviews

Text: Peter Lyon, Jack Rix, Oliver Marriage, Mat Watson / Photos: Matt Vosper

12th January 2008

Forget Sudoku, YouTube or even skateboarding... the coolest crazes involve cars – and we have tried some of the biggest in the world of motoring.

Members of the Auto Express team have visited four different continents to take the plunge in activities such as sliding cars sideways round race tracks, driving them through ice-cold water and tuning their engines. Each craze is different and extremely entertaining in its own way. So read on to find out why it’s cool to be car crazy...

Craze: Wet roading
Location: UK

Reporter: Jack Rix, staff writer

This is the newest car craze sweeping the country. Rather than heading off the beaten track, it involves driving your 4x4 on a road – albeit one that’s flooded with water. There is even a website dedicated to the ‘sport’ – wetroads.co.uk lists more than 200 locations of suitable water fords.

I used this to find several locations off the A171 near Scarborough, N Yorks, and went in the perfect vehicle for the job – a Land Rover Defender. Andy Young – 4x4 instructor and owner of Moorland Off-road Adventure Sport – was on hand to give some expert advice. He told me the number one rule is never to submerge the vehicle’s air intake; in some road cars, this can be located as low down as the front bumper.

Also, you should leave your engine running for 10 to 15 minutes afterwards to dry off the various components under the bonnet. Oh, and it’s crucial your dipstick is firmly in place, or it could be water lubricating your engine, rather than oil.

Finally, before taking the plunge, it’s important to check exactly how quickly the water is moving – you don’t want to be washed off downstream. That’s why, rather than go straight in at the deep end, my first port of call was a tiny water splash, no more than four inches deep. This could be taken at speed, sending spray flying into the air – which instantly turned to ice when it hit the road.

Next, I tried a much longer crossing, with water 60cm deep. This obstacle required an entirely different technique. With the gearbox set to low ratio and slotted into first, I took both feet off the pedals and let the Land Rover crawl across to the other side.

Wet roading is fantastic, and proves you don’t have to be travelling fast to enjoy yourself. All anyone needs is four wheels, a sense of adventure and an awareness of the dangers, both to yourself and your car.

If you plan to tackle a serious route, we would suggest getting behind the wheel of an off-roader, given its higher ground clearance. And it’s also a good idea to travel in a convoy of at least two cars. This will ensure you can be towed out of any sticky situations. Otherwise, wet roading is relatively easy to do – I’d thoroughly recommend it.

Craze: Burn-outs

Location: Australia

Reporter: Peter Lyon, Japan correspondent

As an Australian, I admit we can be a little brash. And one of our biggest motoring-related events proves this. Summernats is staged over a long weekend every January in Canberra, and attracts a crowd of up to 80,000 per day. So what do these spectators come to see?

Well, there’s no precision driving here. Instead, the entrants turn up to do the biggest burn-out possible in an Aussie-built Holden or Ford V8 muscle car, and preferably burst at least one tyre in the process.

Why? Because that draws the biggest cheers. And to check out what gets the crowd screaming, and see how far I could go, I jumped aboard a red Holden HQ GTS, fitted with a 4.2-litre V8. Cruising on to the bitumen stage, surrounded by more than 50,000 punters, I dropped the clutch and got the muscle car burning rubber.

As the rear started to move left, it initiated a gentle spin. In Oz, that’s called a ‘helly’ – it takes its name from the movements of a chopper’s blades. After two minutes of non-stop burn-outs and countless hellies, my rear left tyre burst with a great thud – and the buzz I got from having tens of thousands of people applauding me was amazing.

Craze: Precision tuning

Location: Germany

Reporter: Oliver Marriage, road test editor

As you’d expect from a nation with derestricted autobahns, Germany is addicted to high-performance cars. So as well as famous marques such as BMW and Porsche, there’s a host of firms you’ve never heard of dedicated to making the best models even better.

Welcome to the land of the aftermarket tuning specialist. This industry is worth around three billion euros a year, and employs some of the most talented engineers around. They aim to improve every aspect of the cars – not only the power, but also design, handling, noise and quality.

Most tuners are entirely independent, and although some focus on one brand (AC Schnitzer with BMW, Ruf and 9ff on Porsche, for example), most can turn their hand to anything. I joined a group of tuners at a test track to see them push their upgrades to the limit. At the gathering was a twin-engined Audi TT with more than 1,000bhp, and a 600bhp twin-turbo VW Golf – one of the world’s fastest hatches.

But it’s the attention to detail that sets the Germans apart. Cars are often stripped back to a bodyshell before work begins, and every part is upgraded so it can cope with the extra forces involved.

Brakes, gearboxes, exhausts, the structure itself... Often,
all that’s left is a familiar silhouette. Of course, such comprehensive work costs – the 600bhp Golf is worth nearly three times as much as the donor car, at £70,000.

But that’s the price you’ll pay to get an expert tuner to turn your car into something special. And watching them at work, and experiencing the fruits of their labour on the track, is truly breathtaking.

Craze: Drifting

Location: Japan

Reporter: Peter Lyon, Japan correspondent

The process of sliding a car round corners using power oversteer has been made universally popular by the Fast and the Furious movies.

Called drifting, it began as an underground movement on the streets of Japan more than 40 years ago. But it didn’t hit the big time until the late Eighties, when racer Keiichi Tsuchiya – aka the Drift King – began sliding his car through corners to raise public interest in motorsport.

Tournaments sprung up all over Japan in the early Nineties, and in 2001 came the creation of the world’s first professional competition, D1 Grand Prix.

I decided to check out Japan’s gift to the world of motorsport at the home of drifting – the Ebisu Circuit 186 miles north-east of Tokyo – with ex-D1 GP champ Nobushige Kumakubo.

Armed with a turbocharged 250bhp Nissan Silvia S14, I lined up alongside 20 other drifter wannabes. After several years of club racing in the likes of the Mazda MX-5, I know how to keep the rear end planted in the quest for fast lap times. But here at Ebisu, my aim was to get it to step out, and stay there.

On my first try, I had too much throttle and spun out. My second run was a failure, too. Not until my 10th go – with Kumakubo telling me constant medium throttle and subtle counter-steering corrections are the key – did I manage three 360-degree turns.

It became clear you have to leave a spare 30 per cent at the top end of your rev range when sliding or you have no power when you need it. And after moving to the next step – handbrake-initiated drifts – I began to get the hang of it.

You accelerate into the turn in first gear to around 40mph, apply lots of lock, dip the clutch and yank the handbrake all at once. Then feather the throttle to keep the car in a drift.

This enabled me to get the Silvia sliding though a series of turns. It felt impressive and no doubt looked cool, too. But I wouldn’t try drifting on the road – one false move and you can wrap your car round a post, as in the Fast and Furious films!

Craze: Land speed record bids

Location: US

Reporter: Mat Watson, news & features editor

How fast can it go? That’s what thousands of drivers who visit the Bonneville Salt Flats every August try to find out. This is when the legendary speed week takes place. All sorts of people head to Utah’s hallowed salt to push their cars to the limit and get their names in the record books.

The event is organised by the South California Timing Association, and entrants range from corporate teams to one-man bands on a shoestring. They compete in a wide variety of classes, from fully customised jet-propelled cars to normal production vehicles. Each category is broken down into many subdivisions, so there’s something for everyone.

I headed to Bonneville to set my own unofficial speed record for the fastest hire car. My choice of vehicle was a Hertz Shelby GT-H – a limited-edition Ford Mustang made for the rental firm. On the salt, the 4.6-litre V8 car averaged 146.5mph over two one-mile timed runs. But the vast expanse of white made this speed feel like about 30mph – apart from the odd occasion when the tyres lost traction on the slippery surface.

Still, the chance to drive as fast as I could at one of the most famous places in the history of motorsport was amazing.