If you want to drift a car its a fairly easy thing to do, first and foremost you need a rear wheel drive car, or all wheel drive will work also. You need a good strong engine that will break the tires loose when you want them to, so the more power the better. That’s why you see drift cars like Ken Block’s Hoonicorn that have upwards of 850hp. It can be done with less horsepower, but why would you want to.
Now drifting a motorcycle, while the concept may be the same, it’s significantly harder to do. That’s why we don’t see motorcycle drifting competitions popping up all over the world like we do with cars. From what we can tell, the best motorcycle drifters in the world are Ernie Vigil and Nick “Apex” Brocha, who both ride for ICON and have starred in a few epic drift videos. They are fittingly named, Motorcycle vs Car Drift Battle and whether you like fast cars, fast bikes, a lot of tire smoke or the occasional beautiful woman, these videos are for you.
It had been a few years since the guys at ICON had released one of these videos so they stepped it up big time in their latest release. The entire video was shot in 4K and they even called in Hollywood star, and well-known gearhead, Dax Shepard. If you happened to see the film Hit and Run where Shepard stars with his gorgeous wife, Kristen Bell, you might remember that badass 1967 Lincoln Continental that in my opinion was the star of the show. It was actually Shepard’s personal car that was used in the film and apparently it really did have a 700hp V8 under the hood. But we can get more into that in another article, we are talking about bikes today.
It took a little bit of research but I managed to figure out what kind of bikes Vigil and Brocha were riding in this film, turns out they are the Triumph 675 Daytona’s. Apparently, the bikes were able to maintain so much traction at speed that they couldn’t get the tires to break loose and when you’re shooting a drift video that’s not a good thing. So what do you do in that situation? Well, that’s easy, you just add more power! So they went ahead and fitted the bikes with a Garret Turbocharger and that immediately solved the traction issue.
The two Mustangs in the film are pretty badass as well, especially that first one. Not sure on the specs of it specifically but according to the video description the newer pony car was pushing out roughly 1400hp! Plus there is a three-wheeled vehicle that at first I thought was a very highly tuned Polaris Slingshot, but after a little research I’ve determined that its actually something called a Scorpion P6 ( I realized later that it clearly states what it is in the video descriptions). I see a feature on that vehicle coming soon because it sounded pretty badass. But enough of that, let’s get to the video so you can see for yourself.
In case you haven’t seen the previous videos and missed the back story I decided to include the three previous videos so you can get all caught up. Get comfortable because you won’t want to be going anywhere until you’ve seen every one of these videos. I personally don’t think they are quite as good as Ken Block and his Gymkhana videos, but only by a small margin. Which is really saying something considering how badass the Gymkhana films are.
Drift Battle 3
Drift Battle 2
The orignal Motorcycle vs Car Drift Battle
We also figured we would throw in some gratuitous photos of the lovely Kristen Bell since we got on that subject. Enjoy!
