Watch Ryan Tuerck and His Friends Drift Around an Abandoned Soviet Missile Base
Even cooler fact: The shoot was largely improvised.
Take three talented drifters, three high-powered drift cars, and one abandoned Soviet missile base, throw 'em all together into a video production blender, and boom—you get Donut Media's newest creation. And oh boy, is it delightful.
Donut Media took to an empty Soviet military installation in Latvia to film Ryan Tuerck, Matt Powers, and Kristaps Blušs seamlessly sliding about in three different purpose-built drift cars. In the video, which was uploaded to the Donut Media Facebook page on Tuesday, the three drifters can be seen thrashing their cars around the missile base's concrete ground. They fly by massive piles of chopped logs, drift around huge sculptures, and even find the time for a brief lunch. It's everything you could ask for.
The cars—an 800-horsepower BMW E92 M3, a 950-hp E46 M3, and a twin-turbocharged Nissan 370Z—all use LS motors, Autoblog reported.
In an interview with Autoblog, Tuerck explained that some of the roads they were drifting on top of were less than perfect, as you may be able to see in the video.
"Besides the vegetation growing on the roads, the missile launch site was actually in great shape," Tuerck said. "The surface on the old Russian base, on the other hand, was super beat, making it tough to find areas where we could film. We had to spend a little more time getting creative with the shots."
Tuerck also explained to Autoblog that since Donut Media had just two days to shoot, the crew had to wake up early to scout their locations before recording. Because of this lack of time and planning, nothing was intensely choreographed.
"It was all improv," Tuerck said. "That's sometimes the best. You get some of your best ideas under pressure and the Donut crew has plenty of experience running and gunning for shots."
It's a crazy three minutes of almost-non-stop drifting. Now, stop reading this and watch the damn thing.
