Video: Racecars close down UAE mountain roads for high-speed stunt

Dubai - Watch as these racers conquer one of UAE's highest peaks.

The roads leading up to UAE's Jebel Hafeet were closed down recently after a professional sports team conducted a high-speed stunt on the mountain roads.
On October 9, UAE drift team Lunatics by Nature (LBN) dropped the video of the team racing their high-powered cars towards Jebel Hafeet. The team, comprising Sheikh Khalifa Al Nahyan, Sheikh Sultan Al-Qassimi and Dany Neville, first came together in 2015 with the vision of promoting the sport of drifting in the country.
To the uninitiated, drifting is a driving technique where the driver intentionally oversteers the car and makes it 'slide' around a turn. Drifting first came to be in 1970s Japan and was created by racecar driver Kunimitsu Takahashi. It then became its own sport, rather than just a technique after a drift video by Keiichi Tsuchiya became a hit. His drift tape called Pluspy inspired many professional drifters on today's drifting circuits. The sport has also been popularised in racing games, films and TV shows like Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift and Initial D.
The trio, all driving their personal, Nissan S-chassis racecars, were given individual montages before the team converged in Jebel Hafeet where they raced to the top. Speaking to Khaleej Times, the team said that the idea of the 'stunt' was to showcase the beauty of the UAE's natural landmarks as well to promote drifting in the country.

"Jebel Hafeet was a mountain that no team had drifted on before and we wanted to conquer it. We wanted to the let the world know that this terrain is ours. This country is where we were born and raised, and where we will continue to raise the bar for future drifters," the team said.
LBN's stunt is reminiscent of professional drifter Ken Block's viral gymkhana videos (which he also did in Dubai by the way).
The stunt was conducted with the support of local authorities.
The team also revealed that shooting the four-minute video took five days and the roads were closed off in intervals. LBN said: "We want to thank the Abu Dhabi Police General Headquarters, the police department of Al Ain, the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism and the content creators at Collective, who made the Jebel Hafeet drift possible."
The UAE is no stranger to high-speed stunts. In 2016, American drifting icon Ken Block visited Dubai and shot the eighth episode of his gymkhana series in several parts of town. The video took Block all around town, even closing down a stretch of Sheikh Zayed Road for the stunt. In a similar fashion, Top Gear host Richard Hammond raced a Nissan Patrol in his Porsche 918 Spyder along SZR last year. The result? The German hypercar couldn't keep up.

• UAE
• Abu Dhabi