'Launching a 1000 brake horsepower car over the hill at 100mph, it's hard to explain that buzz'

CATCH MY DRIFT: Conor Shanahan seen during the sixth stop of the Drift Masters European Championship in Madrid, Spain. Pic: Jaanus Ree / Red Bull Content Pool.

Conor Shanahan is millimetres from hitting the lead car on the soaking wet Mondello Park racetrack.

Wide-eyed, I'm sitting in the front passenger seat watching as the two cars drift from right to left and back again in a matter of seconds, the chase car exactly mirroring the turns of the one ahead.

F***. I curse out loud and tell myself this isn't real, that it's a video game. It feels like I left my vital organs 100 metres behind, back to where Shanahan and Alan Delaney, the Mondello Experience instructor behind the wheel of the lead car, had powered away from the start line.

Still, it's impossible to look away. It's exhilarating. The close encounters continue for three laps but the longer it goes on, the easier it becomes to watch. Shanahan is a master of his craft, a World and European champion. I'm in great hands.

Drifting is a motorsport that began in Japan in the 1970s but is on the rise in a more structured, corporate fashion, its popularity exploding in the wake of the Tokyo Drift movie that came out in 2006.

Drivers intentionally slide the car sideways through corners at high speeds but remain in full control. The contest isn't about reaching the finish line first; instead, two cars do battle for scores based on criteria.

They have a specific path to follow and, in doing so, must impress with the angles they can produce while sliding the car to earn points, and with the fluidity of the drift in terms of the style and speed they enter corners at.

As is the case in competition, the Cork man takes the lead for the second half of the battle and it's an easier ride for this passenger; I can't see where the chase car is and so settle a little and just enjoy the mastery of his driving.

But my left hand grips the car door throughout, my right door holds onto the seat for dear life. It is only when Shanahan comes to a stop outside the garage that I can finally breathe again. What a rush.

Somehow my head isn't spinning when I put my feet back on gravelly terra firma.

That was something special - a bird's-eye preview of how it would  go at the weekend when up to 30,000 fans made the trip to the famous track outside Caragh in Kildare to see Shanahan and his biggest rivals do battle in the Drift Masters Ireland event.

I ask how fast we were going through the most hair-raising turns. "That wasn't fast," Shanahan grins. "That was around 60%".

A little earlier, sheltering from the lightning and thunder in a Mondello suite, he explained the appeal of drifting.

"It's a very exciting sport to watch because you get to sit down into one place and get to watch basically the whole event from start to finish," the Killavullen man said.

"It's not like other motorsports, where you go to a race track and you're watching one corner, or if you're watching a WRC stage, you get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, go out and see a WRC car for 30 seconds.

"Don't get me wrong, it's amazing, I'm a huge fan of that myself. But to a lot of people, especially the younger generations, when we go to a stadium to race in drifting, it's very exciting.

"It's a very interesting sport to try to follow - there's a lot of rules, a lot of regulations, and with it being a judged sport, it's not simply the first person to the finish line."

Shanahan grew up around motorsport. His parents, John and Valerie, raced in the British Autograss series and his dad rallied for a long time.

Conor started off driving quads but also played football and hurling and, for a time, went away from motorsport before realising it was his real passion.

"I fell in love with the idea of drifting because for me it kind of blew my mind as a kid - 'jeez, is this legal? What am I doing here? I'm flat out sideways on a track'," he recalled.

"It's the buzz that you get. I've been lucky to do other types of motorsport and a little bit of rallying, which is probably one of the most exciting things you can do - you're hitting a jump at 120mph, with a navigator with you calling notes.

"But I still say to people that a 1000 brake horsepower drift car, fully gripped up, launching it over the hill at 100mph, it's hard to explain that buzz to somebody.

"As a kid I chased that feeling. From when I first drove when I was 10-years-old, I started to try and figure out, how am I going to have a career out of this?"

His brother, Jack, was his early inspiration and after watching Jack travel the world to compete, they now travel together. "He's still pushing to the limit," said Shanahan. "It's cool we ended up here."

Conor celebrated his 23rd birthday on Wednesday. He became the youngest winner of the DMEC (European Drift Masters) title in 2023 in front of 53,000 spectators in Poland - a feat he repeated late last year.

In 2024, he claimed the Formula Drift World Championship in the US and won the prestigious Drift Masters GP round in Riga.

In 2025, he earned the title Drift Masters World Champion for the second year running, while this year so far he has focused on competing in the States and has won the Formula Drift World Championship event at Long Beach, California.

As for future plans, he is keeping his options open. "I'll keep going, probably," replied Shanahan. "The only championship that I'm missing that I want to win is the Formula Drift Championship, which we're doing a good job at this year.

"It's a question that gets asked a lot - what's the plan, where's the career going, where do I see myself when I'm 30 or 35.

"Honestly, that really comes down to where this sport goes. I'm very lucky to be at the highest end and hope it keeps growing and gets more recognition, which it deserves.

"What it's doing numbers-wise is better than 90% of other motorsports and I look forward to seeing how it's doing when I get to 30.

"If I win the Formula Drift Championship, it's either one or the other - I try to beat every record in the sport and become the greatest to ever do it, or else I decide I want to go do something else.

"I won't be able to make that decision until I win the last championship that I want. Then if something else exciting comes up, as a kid I always said I don't want to be 40, 50 years old and say I should have tried to do something else.

"It's always in the back of my head that if I had a lot of success in drifting and there was another opportunity to take, in rally or something else, for sure I would experiment with the idea."