GOING ALL-AMERICAN

The wild thing about the wider automotive community is the massive range of tastes and styles that exist, and with a solid vision in mind you can pretty much build anything that you have dreamed up. While these can divide us into smaller cliques, there is one common factor that we know that damn well 100 per cent of us can agree on: everyone loves a full-noise burnout! Throwing stupid amounts of power through the rollers of anything from your mum’s grocery-getter to a 700-plus-kilowatt street weapon, and blowing the tyres off is the purest kind of addiction. Getting the arse end hanging out curb-to-curb (on private roads, of course) has been a favourite pastime of Kiwis for decades, and with young blood taking over the mantle, it’s developed into a whole discipline of its own—mixing the pursuit of destroying rubber with the adrenaline rush of high-speed entries that create the crazy ride known as ‘drifting’.

Those familiar with this magazine will be well versed in what it means to drift. And while we’ve seen the sport dominated by an endless offering of Japanese chassis, in more recent years, there’s been a new class of car brewing. With big torque and easy power gains from an eight-banger quickly becoming the power plant of choice, there are even a few that have gone a step further to ditch Japanese