Watch Drift Master “Mad Mike” Slide His 800-HP Mazda RX-8 Up a Mountain
South Africa’s Franschhoek Pass is no match for this driver’s skills.
If you're not familiar with the work of "Mad" Mike Whiddett, the ballsy New Zealand-reigning drifter who terrorizes asphalt with a rally-prepped Mazda RX-8, well, get with the times. Here's an easy way to get started: a new video of him and his race car doing what the pair does best: performing insane drifts and destroying tires like whoa.
In this clip, uploaded to the Red Bull YouTube channel on Monday, Whiddett is in South Africa with his 812-horsepower RX-8 drift car drifting around Franschhoek Pass, 46 miles from Cape Town. No, there aren't any crazy Ken Block/Gymkhana stunts. There's just a lot of drifting...and that's just fine.
Whiddett can be seen in the video pushing his RX-8 sideways at speeds up to 154 miles per hour around the 9.2-mile mountain road. In a statement released by Red Bull, the driver referred to the filming as his "scariest drift project yet." Whiddett added, "The drive itself is just crazy. There's not much space to error."
Not to get all personal here, but boy, it must seriously be nice to have a Red Bull media budget behind you. To be able to build crazy drift cars one after another, then to be flown to the most remote and beautiful spots in the world to drive those cars...damn, that sounds like a dream come true.
Previously, we've seen Mad Mike get all drifty at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and on-track in a highly-modified MX-5 roadster; if you just search his name on YouTube, you can also find footage of him drifting pretty much everywhere and anywhere else. The man is a drift machine.
