You know, the distance from the extreme and the original, to the boring and the ordinary, is not long. From the time the first Gymkhana was introduced, until today, hundreds of extreme drift videos have appeared on YouTube. The one you'll see here today, however, is unlike any other.
And that's because it was shot in a place that is truly incredible: An abandoned Soviet missile base in Latvia. Cold War-era bases in the former Soviet bloc countries are not used today and so, today, they have the same fate as our Olympic properties. They are abandoned, dilapidated, letting time deconstruct them and nature slowly take them over.
Ryan Tuerck, Matt Powers and Kristaps Bluss traveled to this base recently, turning it into their own "playground". Along with them, they had an amazing trio of cars. Tuerck, an 800 horsepower E92 M3, Powers an E46 M3 with a 950 horsepower V8, and Bluss in a 350Z, also with a V8 of undisclosed horsepower.
And, what is it that makes this video epic? The fact that the base roads, abandoned for decades, are in the dirt and differ from the well-maintained roads you'd see in a typical drift-o-video like this. In a way, it combines some of the wildness of dirt and asphalt rallies, with the drift and improvement scene.
The war missiles of the former military base were replaced by three rear-mounted ground-to-ground missiles....
The three rear-wheel drive beasts are subjected to torture at their hands and by the inhospitable landscape but they reward us with one of the best drift videos out there. I would, of course, have preferred to hear more of the sounds and roars of the eight-cylinder gear rather than the rousing music but the work that has gone into editing the video is excellent and professional and the end result looks fantastic.
