PVC Drifting: Japan's New Way of Enjoying $300 Kei Cars

Lost of MINI owners tried tray drifting. You get the plastic tray from fast food restaurants, place them under the rear tires, pull the handbrake and do donuts. The problem with it is that it's basically stealing, plus the trays only last a few minutes.

Japan found a cool alternative. It's called PVC drifting because they use "slices" of PVC pipe placed over the rear wheels of very cheap kei cars.

There's even a club formed around PVC drifting called K-Soul, which sounds like a Korean boy band. Check this video out!

As you can see, this is the quietest form of drifting ever seen. They use bangers worth only about $300. And because they all have a 660cc engine with about 50 horsepower, the action is slow and safe. You can get as close to the guy in from as you want without having to worry about dings or your own wellbeing.

How do they get the PVC pipes cut and placed over the tires? Well, that's covered in the video too. You let all the air out of the tires first... obviously. The Japanese use winter studless tires, which have the grip to hold the PVC yet and are also very malleable.

But that's not all. Because the plastic gets hot when in constant friction with the road, the Japanese fitted an on-board water-dispersal system.

The rings themselves come from 4-meter long sections of aquarium-grade piping which are cut into parts by hand. We calculated that these tires are roughly 17 inches tall around the outside, so about the size of a standard rim. If you can find 20-inch PVC pipes, this "technology" could also work on the regular bangers we have, not just shrunken Suzukis and Mazdas.