Check Out this Drift-Spec DeLorean Ripping Around its Hometown

The DeLorean is a car with a complicated history. Within barely a decade, it went from conception as a game-changing, eco-friendly sports car of the future, to short-lived production as an underperforming, unreliable commercial flop from a company whose founder was soon wrapped up in scandal, to one film franchise making it a cultural phenomenon and one of the few cars almost anyone can identify by name.

Sometimes lost among the many twists and turns in the DeLorean story is where it was built. While it was developed by an American company, designed by an Italian and powered by a French engine, the DeLorean was built during its short 1981 to 1982 production run in Belfast, thanks to a deal brokered by company founder John Z. DeLorean and the British government.

At the time, it and the jobs it created seemed like a huge boost for a city that had suffered the same economic decline as so many others in Britain and Ireland during the 1970s, and had the added difficulty of being one of the centres of the political and religious conflict known as the Troubles, to the extent that the factory had separate gates for Catholic and Protestant workers.

Like the DeLorean, Belfast itself has a very different and more positive legacy than many likely could have predicted at the time. The city has rebounded economically and now has a growing tourism sector, and much like the other ambitious but ultimately doomed form of transport built there – the Titanic – the DeLorean is celebrated as part of the local identity.

All this brings us on to French drifter and Monster Energy athlete Alexandre Claudin. A few years ago, he showed off his latest creation, a DeLorean designed for the express purpose for going sideways – not that there’s much DeLorean left in it. Based around a custom tubeframe chassis and with a widened body, the original and rather feeble 2.9-litre, 130bhp rear-mounted PRV V6 is long gone. Instead, there’s a Chevrolet LS V8, now mounted up front and pushing around 500bhp.

Earlier this month, roads on Northern Ireland’s north coast played host to the annual North West 200, a crown jewel in a particularly unhinged breed of public road-based motorbike races largely unique to the area, and ahead of putting on a demonstration at the event, Claudin took his drift-built DeLorean on a tour of its hometown.

The tour took in Belfast landmarks including the City Hall, the Titanic Museum and a mural depicting the car in full time machine spec, as well as taking the opportunity for some tyre-shredding donuts in front of the city’s iconic yellow Harland & Wolff dock cranes. It’s a fitting backdrop, we think, for a car that could have easily been tossed on the ever-growing pile of admirable but ultimately overambitious failures, but instead has become part of the cultural and historical fabric of a city.