Today, the Internet is full-up with racers, drifters, and drag racers scaring members of the non-motoring press. It’s kind of played out, one supposes, but this classic video is an original and fairly unique take on it. In the dead of the Dutch winter, a reporter and cameraman pile into a BMW 2002 with Rob Slotemaker, a regular driver of all things in the 1960s and 1970s. Slotemaker takes them around the coastal track at Zandvoort in Holland and proceeds to hoon the BMW around the ice and snow on the racetrack. The reporter gets nervous at a few points and if he’s never been in a car with a professional before, that would be understandable. Slotemaker heaves the car from side to side in gorgeous four-wheel drifts and even makes a few 360-degree spins on purpose.
While the interview is entirely Dutch and therefore I have no idea what’s being said, it’s likely this was a piece on Slotemaker’s driving school. He established a “skid school” in the 1950s to teach drivers how to handle low-grip conditions and sliding cars on the road. The school is still open today. Unfortunately, Slotemaker isn’t around to teach at it. He drove Triumphs and Alfa Romeos at Le Mans regularly, but spent the last few years of the 1970s racing Camaros in Holland and Belgium. Unfortunately, during a race at Zandvoort in 1979, his Camaro spun on an oil slick and struck a medic car parked just off the course. The injuries Slotemaker sustained in the crash proved fatal.
Nevertheless, Slotemaker’s skid school and his impeccable car control are both captured in a beautiful snow-drifting video. Slide on, Rob.
Rob Slotemaker invented drifting as we know it today.
This is an awesome video where late reporter Henk Terlingen (famous for narrating the Appolo program on Dutch television) didn’t keep his undees clean.