Last week the Drive Festival was held just east of Toronto, and anyone with a driver’s license and couple of bucks could drive a Porsche, Ferrari or even a Police Cruiser. The location was the Mosport DDT (Driver Development Track). It’s pretty hard to wreck a car at the DDT; it’s a low speed circuit and the concrete walls are well back from the edge of the track.
Significant rain had fallen, so event organizers asked participants to take their road cars out on track and drive as fast as possible to dry the surface. And thus, Demaras Racing’s mini monster truck became a ‘race truck’ just like those good ol’ boys in NASCAR.
Between the GMC Sierra’s suspension lift and massive off-road tires, there’s never been a vehicle less suited to the race track. Drifting through the corners and skidding through braking zones was never so much fun! The truck drove through standing water like a kid playing in puddles.
This 2016 GMC Sierra started off the day as a tow-vehicle, but finished the day as a race truck. Amazing!
A quick thank you to Phoebe from Drops of Ink for her recommendations about AI generated images. There’s no pictures of the truck on track (since we were busy driving it) but through AI we got renderings of a GMC that look better than reality.
I don’t know why these videos are so mesmerizing, but they definitely are. You’re a hero for volunteering to help dry off the track but I dont know how you could refuse something so fun!
We tried different frame rates on this video. 60 frames per second creates a smooth, floating, almost hyper-realistic video. Add in stabilization, and it’s quite immersion and almost mesmerizing.
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At 24 FPS, there’s more motion blur, which some people say makes a video look more cinematic. I’m not a big fan of that for driving videos, though.
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We were really worried we’d just slide off the track on the truck. It’s really not made for high-speed maneuvers
I felt like you only sped up on the straightaway.
That is because I was terrified. Nice and slow through the corners, splash the puddles, job done.
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Spin off track? Great shame.
Oh yes that would be so humiliating.
Well I wouldn’t go so far as to call humiliating. It was a soaking wet track.
Embarrassing? Totally. Thank the racing gods that did not happen!
Eminently reasonable