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Drift cars have a look that’s honestly getting a little old at this point. They’ve all got no front bumper, ratty skirts, a giant rear wing, and if their owners feel weebish, an itasha wrap. What the drift scene needs is cars like this BMW (Bavarian Motorized Watercraft) E46 3 Series, which has gone viral after stealing the show at a drift event in Pennsylvania.
The car was built and driven by Brandon Tothero, who told The Drive his build was inspired by seeing people mount jetski bodies on bikes and scooters. With his local drift haunt Evergreen Raceway Park in Drums, Pennsylvania, holding a car decorating contest for a drift event just before Halloween, he decided to try something similar with his longtime drift car: a 2001 BMW 330ci (E46) convertible.
Building the drift boat proved as simple as snagging a free 1969 Johnson Surfer from a local, getting out a saw, and fabricating some brackets to hold the boat’s hull down. He made sure that the front mount was hinged, and that the rear was attached only by four bolts, so he can prop it up to change the rear tires—something you’ve got to do a lot of on drift cars.
“My estimate is the boat body is around 800 pounds, so the car definitely handles different,” Tothero told The Drive. “I can feel the weight while in transition, and had to adjust my driving to accommodate the extra width and length. I had to up tire pressure pretty drastically as well to take some grip out of the car so that it slid easier. Once I got some laps in though, I got comfortable and probably ran 60-plus laps this weekend with it.”
And during those laps, the many bemused spectators at the track captured videos that have gone viral internationally, accruing millions of views across multiple platforms in barely a day. The response has been so enthusiastic that Tothero says he’s going to stick with the boat body full-time, and further improve his car from there. Let’s hope those improvements involve hanging life preservers from its sides, and swapping the steering wheel for one from a boat. A sponsorship from Long John Silver’s would also seem to be in order too, no?
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