BMW has reclaimed the Guiness World Record for the longest drift. Having previously held a version of the accolade - after sliding an F10 M5 continuously for 51.3 miles in 2013 - the German manufacturer lost it to a chap named Harald who travelled a whopping 89.55 miles in his Toyota GT86 a year later. That record was bested once more - although, it seems, not Guiness-officially - when, last summer, Jesse Adams of South Africa's The Star Motoring skimmed over the surface of the Gerotek Testing Facility for nearly six hours, travelling 102.5 miles in the process.
Now BMW has topped even that, laying down a new gauntlet of 232.5 miles during an epic eight hour driftathon. The car of choice this time around was, of course, the new F90 M5 with Johan Schwartz, the same man behind the wheel during the 2013 run, at the controls. Said Schwartz, "When I saw that my old record got beaten, that was cool. I thought it was excellent because it just gave me another opportunity to go out and do it again." Sounds like our kind of guy!
Needless to say, the record means very little - given its complete lack of real world relevance and the flexibility of the rules vis-a-vis stopping and whatnot - but there are still one or two things to take away from it. The first being that the addition of all-wheel drive for the first time in this iteration of the M5 has certainly not deprived it of the ability to hoon with the best of them. The second that JLR had better watch its back when it comes to spurious publicity stunts. And the third, and arguably most impressive, coming in the knowledge that car-to-car mid-tandem-drift refuelling is a thing that's possible - the M5 giving new meaning to 'splash and dash' in order to keep its record attempt alive for longer. If BMW can manage that, then surely the F1 brain trust can figure out a way of pumping a little race fuel into its cars during a race without setting everything on fire or bankrupting half the grid...
You can check out the video of the record attempt below, as well as take a closer look at how the cars were prepared for the unique challenges that eight hours of burning rubber presented.