Englishtown’s legendary quarter mile closed a few years back. If you see two Corvettes lining up under the tower now, it’s not for drag racing; it’s for drifting.
I don’t know what it is that I find so particularly satisfying about this vid. Probably it’s that there are two Corvettes being driven by people who might not have fit into the traditional Corvette demographic even a few years ago. That is, they can drive. If two silver Corvettes found themselves at the lights together, it used to be that this would happen:
Now we get to see them engaging in that most American of automotive traditions: the figure eight. It looks sketchy at all times.
The other thing that I find so satisfying, I think, is the repurposing of American classics for up-do-date tandems. That the cars drifting here are Corvettes, that they’re on the Englishtown drag strip—this is the same kind of attitude, the same kind of cars, the same setting as it’s been for years, but with a new energy.
Modern Corvettes, of course, make great drift cars. The C5, C6, and C7 generations have found a following in the drift crowd that was getting tired of swapping LS engines into old Nissans when they could just buy a Corvette with an LS in it off the rip. A salvage title Vette with new suspension didn’t seem to cost anyone more than a fully-built 240SX anyway, and didn’t perform worse either.
I guess the open question is if the C8 Corvette will be able to keep this new tradition alive, but if you can find a way to repurpose Englishtown’s drag strip into a Formula Drift venue, I think anything’s possible.
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