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Refueling The 2018 BMW M5 Mid-Drift Is Hard, But Not Impossible

So you like the Mercedes-AMG E63 S 4Matic+ because it’s more powerful, more elegant, and a lot noisier than the F90 M5? Your taste in fast sedans is good, but BMW has a bragging right the three-pointed star can’t claim for itself, at least not now.
Watch the ALL-NEW BMW M5 refuel mid-drift to take TWO GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS titles 67 photos
Photo: screenshot from YouTube
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On December 11, 2017, professional racing driver and precision driving instructor Johan Schwartz took to the BMW Performance Center in Greer, South Carolina, to break not one but two Guinness World Records in the all-new M5. You know, the one the purists diss because it comes with M xDrive all-wheel-drive instead of the more traditional RWD configuration.

The first and most important of the two records is for the longest vehicle drift in 8 hours (232.5 miles or 374.1 kilometers). The second is a lot more impressive if you’re into the technicalities of driving, with Schwartz and Performance Center driving instructor Matt Mullins calling dibs on the longest twin-vehicle drift (49.25 miles or 79.2 kilometers) the world has ever seen.

Arguably the maddest guy around, and the one who made both records possible, is refueler Matt Butts. While matching Schwartz drifting speed and angle, Butts had to get out of the right-hand side rear passenger window of the F10 M5 refueling car to refuel the F90 M5. And he did it for a mind-boggling five times to keep the 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8 in the lead car going throughout the uninterrupted eight-hour drift. Madness, alright.

There was little margin for error in this situation, and inevitably, the F10 and F90 touched a handful of times. At the end of the day, however, the biggest winner is BMW, which managed to outperform its previous record from 2013.

As a brief refresher, South African journalist Jesse Adams managed to steal BMW’s previous record with a 102.5-mile (165-kilometer) drift in 2017. His weapon of choice was a Toyota GT 86 sports car, which in comparison to the F90 M5, didn’t benefit from a motorized refueling rig. It took Adams five hours and 46 minutes to set the drift-tastic record on a wet skip pad.

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About the author: Mircea Panait
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After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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