'Mad Mike' Whiddett: King of the hill

Mike Whiddett performs at the RedBull Conquer The Crown in Queenstown. Photo / Supplied

You don't have to be 'Mad Mike' to drift a very fast car around this hill ... oh, heck, yes you do. Brad Lord reports

He's left tyre marks on a frozen lake at the northernmost point of Japan, gone apex-to-apex, sideways, at the Yas Marina Formula 1 circuit in Abu Dhabi and burned rubber on Hollywood Boulevard outside the famed Chinese Theatre. Now Auckland-based professional drifter "Mad Mike" Whiddett can add New Zealand's highest paved road - across the Crown Range - to the list.

The chance to go flat-out up and over the blacktop linking Queenstown and Wanaka came through Whiddett's sponsor, Red Bull. It was in aid of a viral video titled Conquer The Crown - a short but very sweet clip that attracted more than a million views on the energy drink maker's YouTube channel in less than 10 days. The numbers are growing fast.

Extensively modified to allow it to be driven sideways at speed with precision, Whiddett's RX-7 features a New Zealand-designed quad rotor engine modelled off the racing unit that Mazda engineered for its 1991 Le Mans-winning 787B. Essentially, its two Mazda 13B twin-rotor engines are fused together through a common crankshaft. That means 2.6 litres of cubic capacity and more than 500 horsepower available at the RX-7's back wheels. Perhaps the only things more impressive than the engine's on-paper specifications are the flames it throws and the noise it makes on its way to a stratospheric redline.

For filming, the 10.47km, 47-corner road was broken into three sectors, beginning with a steep mountain climb incorporating seven near-180-degree hairpins. "The switchbacks were one of the most challenging sections of the road," says Whiddett. "It was really wet in the morning so that affected how fast I could drive, and the amount of grip the car had."

After the initial climb the road flattens and straightens out over the Crown Terrace, and it's on this high-speed section that the RX-7 tops out at 232km/h at the maximum of sixth gear.
The final drive ratio was the limiting factor, but it's fast enough for Whiddett, who doesn't
hesitate in labelling it the ''scariest thing'' he's done in the car.

''I was trying to put all my concentration into my driving,'' he says, ''but at that sort of speed on an unfamiliar road with trees and rocks and drop-offs, I couldn't help but worry about all the noises and vibrations that the car was making, and the dangers of going off. I've done some crazy things in this car, but nothing has ever come close to this.''

The final run up to the 1072m summit at the Crown Saddle resonates most with Whiddett.
Before drifting evolved into a bona fide motorsport, its roots were deep-seated in the winding mountain roads of Japan where late-night congregations of modified cars and enthusiastic owners honed their collective oversteer skills in illegal and highly dangerous
ways, often with catastrophic consequences.

With a mixture of perfectly sculptured fast, medium and slow corners, guided by a rock
face on one side and barriers to the other, it's not at all hard to draw parallels here. ''I've always wanted to drive a Japanese-style drift road, and I don't think I could have found anything closer to the real thing than the last section,'' says Whiddett. ''That was a dream come true.''

As you'd expect from the company that sent a man to the edge of space in a balloon and then captured his descent, surpassing the speed of sound, from multiple angles, Conquer The Crown has a cinematic quality. More than 20 crew were involved on the ''set'', using cameras that included a Cineflex-equipped helicopter and a 2500 frame-per-second Phantom unit to capture the action for superslow-motion playback.

View the Conquer The Crown video clip here