Somewhere in the Gulf, a Toyota Camry sliding sideways down an empty highway is as recognizable a piece of car culture as a Nissan GT-R launching off the line in Japan or a lifted truck bouncing through mud in Texas. Locally it’s known as Arab drifting or Saudi drifting, and it turned an unassuming midsize sedan into one of the most feared machines on the internet, not because of what it can do on paper, but because of what people do to it in the desert.
That reputation comes down to geography as much as anything else. Gulf drifting culture grew up around wide-open desert highways with plenty of room to make mistakes, conditions that are hard to find almost anywhere else. So when a European creator decided he wanted to become the first non-Arab European to give it a proper try, he hit a snag before he’d even found a car worth crashing. The thing barely exists on his continent.
Toyota doesn’t currently sell the Camry in Europe, which meant the whole project hinged on tracking down one car that almost nobody there was supposed to own.
Hunting Down the Only One
Finding a Camry with the right engine turned into a real project rather than a quick errand. A dealership visit confirmed what he already suspected: the V6 Camry that Gulf drifters swear by simply wasn’t being sold new anywhere nearby. That left the used market, and even there, listings were so thin that he half-joked the car he eventually found might be the only V6 Camry in the entire country.
He tracked one down in Austria, a black V6 sedan being sold privately for 6,000 euros, or roughly $6,500. Before handing over the money, he met the seller in person and ran a vehicle history check, just to make sure the car hadn’t been quietly rebuilt from a wreck, a smart move given how little backup exists for a car this uncommon in the region. The check came back clean, and just like that, one of the loneliest Camrys in Europe had a new owner with a very specific plan for it.
Turning a Front-Wheel-Drive Sedan Sideways
The real test happened on a private airfield rented out just for the occasion. This is where the gap between Gulf drifting and casual sliding around a parking lot becomes obvious. A front-wheel-drive Camry doesn’t rotate the way a rear-wheel-drive car does, and getting one sideways on purpose takes speed that most drivers would never associate with a family sedan.
Before he ever pushed the car into a slide, he walked through the method he’d pieced together from studying Gulf drift videos: build serious momentum, use weight transfer to unsettle the chassis, then commit hard once the back end starts to come around. Below roughly 140 km/h, around 87 mph, he didn’t think it would work at all. It was a theory built from research rather than experience, and the airfield was where he’d actually find out.
Turns out, he was right. He topped out around 190 to 200 km/h on the straight, close to 118 to 124 mph, then worked the car through a series of slides in the 100 to 140 km/h range, holding a front-wheel-drive sedan sideways at speeds that would make most drivers let off the gas immediately. Whatever doubts he had walking in, the car backed up the theory the moment he actually committed to it.
Where the Car Finally Gave Up
The one part of the plan that didn’t survive contact with reality was the two-wheel stunt. Using a ramp set up at the edge of the runway, he tried again and again to tip the Camry up onto its side wheels, a move closely tied to the more extreme end of Gulf drifting culture. Each attempt lifted the car partway before it thudded back down onto all four wheels.
The car’s open differential was the culprit. With one wheel up in the air and free to spin, there was no way to send power to the wheel still on the ground, so the car never had enough drive to hold the pose. Between the high-speed slides and the repeated ramp attempts, one of the front tires eventually shredded, cutting the experiment short and leaving him with a long drive home on a single spare tire and a lot of adrenaline.
A Stock Camry’s Real Limit
The high-speed slides proved his research right. A stock, unmodified V6 Camry really can be pushed sideways at Gulf-style speeds with nothing more exotic than momentum, weight transfer, and a driver willing to commit to it. The two-wheel stunt was a different story, and it stayed just out of reach, undone by a differential the car was never built to fight.
That gap lines up with something he seemed to sense himself while watching footage of Gulf Camrys clearing 240 km/h, well beyond anything his own car could touch. The cars behind the most extreme videos out of Saudi Arabia and the UAE may well be quietly built up for exactly this kind of punishment. His Camry, tracked down through a European listing for 6,000 euros, got remarkably close on nothing but stock hardware. It just wasn’t quite built to finish the job.
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