In St. Petersburg, during a drift, a tire that had flown off returned to its place

During the first stage of the St. Petersburg Drift Championship, Let's Drift, a tire came off Artem Perepelitsa's car while it was moving and then returned to the rim, according to Fontanka.

According to the organizers, this has never happened before in drifting. "There have been cases where the wheels came off completely. But here, the tire jumped off the disk and returned to its place," they noted, adding that the tire was re-mounted on the rim because the car did not slow down after it came off.

Professor of the "Automobiles" department of the Moscow Automobile and Road State Technical University (MADI) Vitaly Gaevsky told Fontanka that such a thing can happen, but "it's a one in a million chance".

"The wheel was sliding, the pilot was in a turn at that moment. The trajectory of the tire's movement coincided with the trajectory of the disk's movement. The tire rolled straight ahead by inertia when it jumped off, and the disk continued to slide. It slid on the asphalt like a ski on ice, and it may not have been rotating at all," he noted.

The professor also compared what happened to how tires are installed in tire shops, where the tire is "hooked over the rim with one edge and rotated. Then the tire jumps on by itself".

"The disk, sliding on the road, coincided with the rolling tire in its movement. The edge of the tire got on the disk, and then it was pulled on due to the high speed. The tire mounting was transferred to the road. A unique case, but possible. I think that a miracle is just an unrecognized pattern," Gaevsky concluded.

Perepelitsa himself found out what had happened only after the race, when he watched the video. He noted that "there is a feature of the track in one place: a concrete zone runs along the asphalt, which is slightly higher than the road surface. If you hit the wheel there with a certain trajectory, which happens quite often, the disk breaks and the tire comes off. Participants have lost tires there many times".

The pilot added that usually, there are no consequences from losing a tire in drifting, and if it hadn't returned to its place, he would have finished the race in the same way.

Photo: Let's Drift