Posts Tagged ‘rallying’

The Evolution of the Drifting Angle

Monday, February 21st, 2011
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The title of the film might sound like that of some strange B&W Open University physics lecture off the telly in the 1970s, but it’s actually a brilliant film about the history, culture, person­al­ities and fast times of rallying.

And it fact, the title sounds even funnier in German.

Put together by enthu­siast Helmut Deimel, it’s a passion­ately conceived piece of history that brings together killer archive action and inter­views with almost every big name in rallying over the last few decades.

Documenting everything from the back-​​happy extremism to 4WD drift and beyond through the irresponsible madness of Group B, the film does for Rallying what Dogtown and Z Boys did for Skateboarding — only with a lot more Finnish people.

For some reason the video is available extens­ively in full length on the WWW for your enjoyment. We wouldn’t be so rude as to post the whole video, but enjoy the trailer above and hunt down a copy for yourself.

It’s a brilliant way to spend ninety minutes.

Gymkhana 2: Ken Block Buster

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

There’s been a lot of nonsense written and spoken about the world of extreme sports. Laden with the image of the bugged out adultes­cents redolent of the marketing campaigns for energy drinks, baggy b-​​boy denim and the idiotic language of dudish, the mainstream world unsur­pris­ingly sneers at much of surf and skate­board culture. But in Ken Block, the petrolhead community has the most credible of crossovers.

Block, one of the founders of giant skate shoe company DC shoes, and has competed as a skate­boarders, a snowboarder as well as a motocross rider. But after DC was bought out by even bigger surf brand Quiksilver in 2004, Ken decided to go racing full time.

Right from the start, it was apparent that block was the real deal. Not only is he a brilliant precision driver, his hard-​​won skinny on the yoof marketing racket has created a ground­breaking set of youtube block-​​busters (no pun intended), that has set the revhead world alight.

Props go out to the technical quality of this, the second instalment of the Gymkhana series, as well as our Ken’s preter­natural dexterity behind the wheel. Super technical skate videos are difficult enough to put together, with endless takes required to make the subjects look like superheroes.

Who knows how long it took to put this balletic beauty on the WWW?