BMW racing driver Johan Schwartz took to the wheel of the new M5 to complete the marathon stunt. Matt Mullins, another professional BMW precision driver, took control of the refuel car, which was an F10 M5, drifting in tandem with Schwartz’s M5. The new M5 was refuelled five times over eight hours and averaged a speed of 46.67kph with a whopping continuous wet drift of 374km.
Quite expectedly, this attempt broke another record as the two cars drifted in tandem for 79.26km over one hour. This is the longest twin-vehicle drift recorded by Guinness. A custom refuelling system was installed on both cars to ensure the safety and smoothness of refuelling while the record attempt was underway.
Schwartz said: “We knew that if we were going to recapture the world record for the longest sustained drift and set the bar as high as possible, we would need to find a way to keep the M5 going without stopping to refuel. In the end, the refuelling system worked flawlessly and the M5 performed as expected. It was a big win all around.”
The previous record, set by German driver Harald Müller in a Toyota GT86, was 144.11km – less than half of BMW’s effort. This record was set in July 2014.
BMW has a history of drift records, however. The German carmaker had held the longest drift record of 82.523km in 2013, prior to Toyota. This 2013 record (broken by the previous-generation M5) had in-turn broken the 2011 record – a dry 2.30km drift in a Mercedes-AMG C63. This record had been held by Mauro Calo, a staffer in our sister publication, Autocar UK.
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