Sixteen-year-old kart racer Chloe Chambers set a new Guinness World Record last month in a new Porsche 718 Spyder: the world’s fastest 50-cone slalom in a production vehicle. That’s roughly half a mile of back-and-forth slalom action, all driven as fast as possible.
Guinness World Records confirmed to The Drive that Chambers completed the half-mile run in just 47.45 seconds on August 21, 2020—just beating Jia Qiang’s 2018 record of 48.114 seconds.
I don’t know if anyone really thinks about slaloms in terms of length besides autocross course designers, but this one looks and sounds particularly tiring. According to Porsche, the slalom was 2,500 feet long, with 50 cones spaced just a little over 49 feet apart from each other across a runway at New Jersey’s Solberg Airport.
Professional surveyors laid out the cones at the precise distance required using GPS, and Guinness staff watched on using a drone to make sure no cones were hit. That’s right: there are no time penalties here. You either do the run cleanly, or it doesn’t count.
That long of a slalom is terrifying for those of us who can’t even get the right rhythm down for a six- or seven-cone slalom, but Chambers has had years of practice. Porsche notes that Chambers started autocrossing at an early age, winning a championship in her region by age eight, and a state championship just three years later.
If you’re feeling a bit dizzy from just thinking how many times you’d spin out when trying this even once, it’s worth noting that she practiced this feat for days leading up to it, with dozens of practice runs. On the day of the record attempt itself, there were warm-up runs, too.
Right before the record-breaking run, Chambers managed to tie the existing record to the hundredth of a second. Then, with enough heat in the tires to make it stick, she got that record-setting 47.45-second run. Nice work.
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