Burnouts, drifts and handbrakes: which are most fun?

Skydiving or crochet? A gentle ramble across the Yorkshire Dales or a masochistic 20-mile obstacle course filled with the dubious promise of mud in your unmentionables? Bridge club or superclub? It’s virtually impossible to define “fun” in any meaningful way, simply because we all have different versions of the recipe.

But when it comes to “fun” in cars, I defy you to be able to ignore a little bit of light hooliganism. Because stupid and unproductive has been fun since man first told jokes about mammoth trunks. Pointlessness is fun. You can intellectualise it, give it meaningful weight and psychological purpose, but if it makes you happy, then that’s the definition. And some of us aren’t all that intellectual.

Photography: John Wycherley

This feature was originally published in issue 285 of Top Gear magazine.

We’ll start small, with a Crazy Cart. Because drifting an electrically motorised tray around an office/airfield/living room is so deeply amusing, you almost forget about the potential for broken ankles.

There’s no way it can be taken seriously, what with the hunched posture (we accidentally Mustang helpfully has a acquired the child-sized model), desperate grimace – mostly when you realise there aren’t any brakes – and sheer, childlike joy on the face of middle-aged men when they first manage a semi-controlled slide on a £400 kid’s toy. Even if it is eye-wateringly close to ending in the side of a Porsche 911 Turbo S.

This is a distillation of fun – no megabucks, no pretension. No slight fear that if you get it wrong, you’ll be picking bits of £150k supercar out of your forehead. Just smiling and glory bruises. Make sense? Of course it does. Ably demonstrated by the fact several hardened 100mph slide-merchants were more than happy to give up their M3s to prat about in the Cart.

We need to talk about the M3 actually. It’s not the car I voted for as the best for sustained slidiness. Too spiky, too hairy. But then even in something friendlier – the C63 Coupe occupies my thoughts – drifting isn’t easy. It causes brows to furrow as you juggle the confusion of steering wheel and pedals.

So how about some unproductive tomfoolery in the TG Rallycross Mini? Again, we’re talking about the kind of car control that serves very little purpose until you graduate to committed rallyist, but seems to amuse beyond all expectation: handbrake turns, reverse-flick J-turns, handbrake drifts that mean you enter a corner in a FWD car backwards.

It’s not big, and it’s not clever, but there’s a reason why it amuses teenage drivers across the world: there’s a tiny bit of you that imagines you have godlike skills, even if it is in a car park in Birmingham. The risk factor is relatively low, and the truth is it never stops being funny.

OK, so the handbrake in the TG Mini is sticky and doesn’t lock like a hydraulic handbrake, and the car itself is lightly uncoiled to cope with the vagaries of celebrity drivers’ skill sets, but the chuckles keep coming when you’ve been tasked with spending half an hour getting a small hatchback as out of shape as possible using nothing but ingenuity and physics. It’s a 3D stressball for petrolheads.

Similarly, off-road mayhem might be considered one of the less erudite forms of expression when it comes to car stuff, but there’s a deep and wide nerve that connects the controlled chaos that comes with driving a car very quickly off-road and your brain’s laughter functions.

For that, you might pick something like the Bowler Defender. A supercharged Jaguar V6 lifted from the F-Type, eight-speed auto and a noise like a large storm contained in a small tin shed, the Bowler demonstrates more than you might think possible how much fun charging about off-road can be.

The car is remarkably stiff – race regulations mean a dearth of suspension travel – and the experience is desperately physical, but the Bowler feels as if you could nuke it from orbit and it’d still come crashing out of the mushroom cloud bellowing like a wounded bull. It flies with the grace of a small block of flats, but a proper rally-spec off-roader gives you the kind of options that fragile, paltry, meek road cars cannot manage.

It’s definitely fun. In fact, almost definitively.

It is not, however, my favourite type of pointlessness. Because that would be a speciality of mine: the humble burnout. Originally intended by drag racers to warm and clean tyres, the static spinning and production of as much smoke as possible has become a classic class-leader in fun.

The aim is simple: stay still and torch the tyres. Bystanders will therefore know that you have a) copious amounts of power and b) the appropriate disregard for being a trailer queen.

Of course, in the way of things, the new Ford Mustang has an electronic function that allows perfect line-locked burnouts, but to be honest, it’s rubbish because it doesn’t allow you to calmly edge forward and “release” the tyre-slaying.

Better to go old-school, and simply switch off the traction control, dial up the revs, smartly pop the clutch and then roll onto the brake, modulating middle pedal and throttle to give the perfect bonfire. Unless you are about to race, it serves no purpose other than childish chest-beating. Showing off with extra noise, and smoke and drama.

Do it wrong, and you look stupid. Do it right, and you laugh like a mad person. It’s pointless. It’s perfect. It’s undeniably the best kind of fun. Whatever your definition.