Why buy a drift car when you can rent one?

Professional drifter Adam Kerenyi has been racing for more than 15 years and knows how much time and energy it takes to run a car competitively for a whole season. Now as the team manager of Turbo Mafia, he wanted to make better use of his drifting cars while making it easier for people to compete. That was the impetus behind Rent a Drift Car, a new company that rents FIA-approved drifting cars ready to compete in European championships. From a 1,000hp BMW E92 to an 850hp Nissan Silvia, this is the easy way to get your drifting kicks.

I’ve been a professional drifter in Europe and had my own racing team. I few years ago I quit professional racing because of a lack of time and money. Last year I was invited to a new racing team to be the team manager. It’s called Turbo Mafia. This team is great. We have our own workshop and a big warehouse, and we build drift cars and sell racing parts. At the end of last year, we had three professional race cars in the garage and only one or two being used, so we wondered how we could make more use of them. We don’t want to sell these cars because they are very good, and that’s when we had the idea to rent them. Renting a drift car is something that’s not very common in Europe. We wanted to become a company for the professional renting of high-level drift cars. Drifters often visit overseas races and events, but there’s no option to rent a competitive drift car. That was the gap in the market we wanted to fill.

We have three cars. All are matching the requirements of both the FIA and the big European championships. We rebuild all the three cars during the winter, so they are like new. We have our own mechanics, two big racing vans, three closed trailers and a lot of spare parts for the cars.

We provide everything they need to compete. Which means we bring the car to the racetrack, all the racing tyres and wheels, the racing fuel, the mechanics and engineers, even the food. All the driver needs is a racing suit. It’s a good solution for drivers like me, or other retired pro drivers, because I don’t want to spend so much time and money on a whole season for racing. It’s also a good option if I only want to compete in a couple of rounds. In these cases, it makes no sense to buy a van, a trailer, a workshop and everything else. The other type of clients are the guys coming from overseas, and professional drivers who want to buy into a team.

Yes. When I was competing, I needed to do a lot of work for a whole season. If you have the money, this allows you to save time that you can then spend with your family or making more money. You can tell us exactly what you need, and we will prepare the car for every round. All the driver has to do is fly in. The driver doesn’t need to spend any time on the preparation side of things, saving them a lot of stress.

Yes, exactly. We provide this service around the European Union because it’s quite easy to travel (well, not this year [laughs]). As soon as we need to leave the EU, then it needs a lot of documentation. But if the client is serious, we can go anywhere.

When I was a professional drifter, I was using Motul, and I also put it in my street bikes and high-performance road cars. When I joined this new team, I told them we need to use Motul because I’m very satisfied with it and its quality. The main engineer agreed with me, too. We are working on two more project cars, and all five cars will run with Motul for sure.