Good point.Originally Posted by old pudd fisher
There are the pendejos doing stupid stuff, but what is sad is that there are actual pendejos watching the pendejos.
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Now i know what the X Games are all about!
Good point.
There are the pendejos doing stupid stuff, but what is sad is that there are actual pendejos watching the pendejos.
•
Now i know what the X Games are all about!
Blasting the AK's just takes this insanity to a whole other level. Kind of cool actually and extremely dangerous and stupid at the same time.
Kinda like fishing at Legg Lake after dark?
Another Saudi Extreme Sport Is Sandal Sliding.
When your foot gets too hot then change feet.
I'd say that I'm shocked at what other cultures find entertaining, until I realize that bungee jumping is an actual activity that people spend hundreds of dollars on here in the states.
I agree. The drifting is actually pretty amazing...what's even crazier is that most of those cars are Honda Accords! which are font wheel drive! do you know how hard it is to make a front wheel drive drift with such control? Kinda weird to say, but some of those guys have mad skills.
Although very dangerous and reckless, it trips me out how theyre doing this with oncoming traffic. Screw closed roads lol. Even the crowd is parked on the side of the road cheering them on, frikin crazy!
Saudis Race All Night, Fueled by Boredom
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Young Saudi men gather at night and race into the morning, changing spots to elude the police. Even riskier than drag racing is a variation called drifting in which drivers intentionally spin and skid.
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: March 7, 2009
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — The young men start gathering around midnight, on a broad strip of highway between the desert and the sea. By 1 a.m. there are hundreds of them, standing in clusters alongside their cars, glancing around uneasily for the police.
Enlarge This Image
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Sulayman al-Shulukhi, left, races his modified Subaru Impreza every weekend night and delights in describing wrecks and spinouts. Movies like “The Fast and the Furious” inspire him.
Enlarge This Image
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Saudis admired cars before a night of racing in Jidda, where little public entertainment exists.
Then, with a scream of revving engines, it begins: a yellow Corvette and a red Mitsubishi go head to head, racing down the road at terrifying speeds, just inches apart. Shouts go up from the sidelines, and another pair of racers shoot down the road, and another.
This may be the most popular sport of Saudi youth, an obsessive, semilegal competition that dominates weekend nights here. It ranges from garden variety drag racing to “drifting,” an extremely dangerous practice in which drivers deliberately spin out and skid sideways at high speeds, sometimes killing themselves and spectators.
For Saudi Arabia’s vast and underemployed generation of young people, these reckless night battles are a kind of collective scream of frustration, a rare outlet for exuberance in an ultraconservative country where the sexes are rigorously segregated and most public entertainment is illegal. They are, almost literally, bored out of their minds.
“Why do they do it?” said Suhail Janoudi, a 27-year-old sales clerk who was watching the races from the roadside with a faint smile around 1:30 a.m. “Because they have nothing else to do. Because they are empty.”
Some young people, asked why they risked their lives this way, said it was because of “tufush,” a colloquial Arabic word for boredom whose meaning is said by some to derive from the gestures made by a drowning man. Drifting, which tends to attract poorer, more marginal men, has also been an unlikely nexus between homosexuality, crime and jihadism since it emerged 30 years ago. Homoerotic desire is a constant theme in Saudi songs and poems about drifting, and accomplished drifters are said to have their pick of the prettiest boys among the spectators. Drugs sometimes also play a role. But a number of drifters have also become Islamic militants, including Youssef al-Ayyeri, the founder of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who fought in Afghanistan and was killed by security forces in Saudi Arabia in 2003.
“The idea behind drifting is, the economy and society don’t need you,” said Pascal Ménoret, an anthropologist who did four years of field work in Riyadh, the capital, and is now teaching at Princeton and writing a book on Saudi youth culture. “They are mostly young Bedouins who recently moved to the city, and whose lives are marked by suffering and self-destructive behavior.”
But most racers are more like young men almost anywhere: restless, thrill-seeking and madly in love with cars.
“It’s implanted in you when you’re a kid, and it stays with you,” said Sulayman al-Shulukhi, 29, who races every weekend night here and has adopted a 1950s greaser look: slicked-back hair, polo shirt with the collar up, jeans and white shoes.
He proudly showed off the modifications he had made to his Subaru Impreza: a carbon fiber spoiler, an intake valve, a special ventilation system, a turbocharger. He then jumped in the car for a ride along one of the racing strips near King Road, not far from Jidda’s Red Sea coast.
“We get up to 120 kilometers per hour on this part” (about 75 miles per hour), he said, as he accelerated down a perilously short trip of highway, “and 200 on this next one.”
As he drove, Mr. Shulukhi narrated a tale of a recent accident on this road in which a friend’s car had caught on fire during a race, and another one in which a driver had spun out of control and died after his car burst into flames. His world is full of driving disasters and driving heroes, some of them local men. He frequently invokes the racing movies “The Fast and the Furious” and its sequels, and “Death Race.”
Later, when the roads have emptied out a bit, it is time for some drifting. Raif Mansour al-Dammas, a skinny 21-year-old who looks much younger, gets into his beat-up white 1980s Nissan and revs the engine until white smoke pours out. Admiring shouts go up from a cluster of young men.
Then the car leaps forward, accelerating furiously, and breaks into a sudden skid, spinning around, nearly colliding with a concrete barrier and leaving thick black marks on the pavement. A stifling smell of burnt rubber hangs in the air.
Standing nearby, Mr. Shulukhi explained that he and his friends, who all race Subarus, were not really drifters. The distinction is more about social status than activity; he and his friends are mostly middle class and do not see themselves as outlaws.
“That’s a different path from what we’re doing,” he said. “That’s crazy, forbidden stuff.”
Mr. Shulukhi mentions the famous case of Faisal al-Otaibi, 27, a drifter who was sentenced to death after his car crashed during a joy ride in 2005, killing three teenage boys he had taken along with him. The sentence was reduced this year to 3,000 lashes, 20 years in prison and a lifetime driving ban.
Since the arrest of Mr. Otaibi, who is always known in the Saudi press as Abu Kab (meaning, roughly, the guy with the baseball cap), the Saudi police have cracked down on drifting, treating all deaths that result from the practice as criminally negligent homicides.
But even drag racing is dangerous, and despite its prevalence in every major Saudi city, the police try to discourage it.
Just after 1:30, a group of police cars show up, lights flashing, sending the racers scattering. The officers do not arrest anyone. They just step out of their cars and begin talking to the young men in a paternal manner, urging them to go home.
“We have another place we go when this happens,” Mr. Shulukhi said confidently, getting into his Impreza and driving a few blocks to a shopping center parking lot. There, scores of other young men are waiting by their cars, some examining their engines. At 2:30, the police show up again, the next step in a game of cat and mouse that lasts much of the night.
This time Mr. Shulukhi and his friends drive north, stopping for coffee at a drive-through called French Roast, until they reach their ace in the hole: a dark strip of highway just outside the city with a construction site on one side and desert on the other. They drag-race their Subarus along a quarter-mile strip for another hour or so.
About 5 a.m., the road begins to fill up with delivery trucks driven by Pakistani immigrants, doing the kind of low-wage job most Saudi men refuse to take. The racers decide to call it a night, and drive reluctantly home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/wo...t/08drift.html
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Saudi Arabia Has the Highest Road Accident Death Toll in the World
Benjamin Joffe-Walt - The Media Line | March 15th, 2010 | 24 Comments | Email this
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Time to turn Saudi youth onto bicycling: video of dangerous stunts on the rise in young Saudi males who purposefully “drift” cars.
An average of 17 Saudi Arabian residents die on the country’s roads each day, a report by the Kingdom’s General Directorate of Traffic has revealed. The news comes after the World Health Organization found Saudi Arabia to have the world’s highest number of deaths from road accidents, which now make up the country’s principal cause of death in adult males aged 16 to 36. First reported by the Saudi daily Arab News, the study found that 6,485 people had died and more than 36,000 were injured in over 485,000 traffic accidents during 2008 and 2009.
There was no official reaction to the unfortunate world record, and Saudi analysts pointed to larger underlying problems.
“The driving problems are with young people,” Ali Abdul-Rahman Al-Mazyad, a Saudi columnist in Riyadh told The Media Line. “There are very little outlets for young people to enjoy themselves and kids basically do what they want.”
“There is also not such great education in schools about driving and respecting the road,” he said. “Drug use is also a contributing factor. These are the central problems.”
The report found that almost a third of traffic accidents in the Saudi capital Riyadh were due to drivers jumping red lights, followed by 18 percent of accidents caused by illegal U-turns. The most common dangerous driving activities were speeding, sudden stops and speaking on the phone while driving.
Over the past two decades Saudi Arabia has recorded 4 million traffic accidents, leading to 86,000 deaths and 611,000 injuries, 7 percent of which resulted in permanent disabilities.
A recent study at the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), a Riyadh-based scientific research group, warned that if the current rise in road accident rates is not curbed, Saudi Arabia will have over 4 million traffic accidents a year by 2030.
Silvio Saadi, a Jeddah-based businessman and film producer, argued that both the government and an out-of-control youth culture were to blame.
“You won’t believe what you see,” he told The Media Line. “It’s just crazy.”
“Saudis often try to drift with normal cars and thousands of spectators on the sides of the street,” he said, referring to an informal motor sport in which drivers intentionally over-steer so as to lose traction and drift on the road. “Sometimes the car drifts into the spectators, slamming them into buildings along the sidewalk.”
Saadi said that while the government has made some initiatives, they have fallen short of an aggressive road safety campaign.
“Outside the city, the police often cannot stop them,” he said. “The police are actually scared because there can be thousands of them. A few years ago they built a Jeddah raceway to attract young people to do it on the track instead of on the streets, but people still like to do it the old fashioned Bedouin way.”
“We get approached every year by government departments to produce public service announcements about speeding but most of the time nothing comes of it,” Saadi added. “Who knows what happens, but there is a lot of corruption. They probably take budgets from the government to do public service announcements and then don’t do it.”
Video of crazy road stunt as Saudi youth skate on the road.
Saudi Arabia has long had a taste for expensive cars, and spottings of young Saudis cruising the streets of Jeddah and Riyadh in Maseratis, Ferraris, Porsches and Harley Davidson motorbikes are increasingly commonplace.
One of the Middle East’s largest car markets, automobile sales make up about three percent of Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product.
Following overstated fears that the global recession might seriously weaken the Arab world’s largest economy, Saudi car sales are now expected to boom. The kingdom’s car market, including both commercial automobiles and transport infrastructure, is currently worth about $9 billion. The market is expected to grow by 30 percent in 2010.
Over 675,000 cars are expected to be sold in 2010 to a population of just under 25 million.
http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/03/...-toll-driving/
Here ya go.... driver vs his own drift car. The fun starts at :30 LMAO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxkbs1ZE5Co
Last edited by fishing_addict; 06-30-2012 at 02:24 PM.
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