Finally, a gift the petrolhead will actually enjoy

We all know how hard it can be to shop for a car guy or girl. We've made that easy for you. Treat them to an experience and a lifetime memory: learning how to drift behind the wheel of a custom-built BMW drift car, alongside a professional drift mentor.

Your petrolhead arrives to a yard full of drift cars and gets straight into the mix for the day. It kicks off with a briefing, then they're out with our mentors, Pro drivers who are right now contending for the IDS championship. Anyone from 13 up can do it, no licence or experience needed, and everything is provided.

They start with the fundamentals and work their way up as the day goes on. The mentors swap around depending on where each driver is at, so a first-timer gets brought along at their own pace, and anyone who already knows their way around a car gets pushed straight into the harder stuff. Ideally, by the end of the day they'll have drifted a full lap on their own, something fewer than one in a thousand people in Ireland can do.

There's more to it than their own runs. They'll ride shotgun for a few fast passenger laps with a coach, there's tea and coffee on the go all day, and since we run alongside the BDD open drift day, they can stay and watch the action for as long as they like. Before they head off, their coach talks them through how they drove, and if they've caught the bug, shows them the progression ladder, where every lesson earns a ranked drift licence and takes them a step closer to competing themselves.

The car

The National Drift Academy car at Bishopscourt, Co. Down.

The car they'll drive is the real thing, a proper drift-built BMW, kitted out with everything you need to learn on and set up the same way our coaches set up their own. It's built to keep them safe too: full roll cage, bucket seats, harnesses, fire extinguisher, the lot. Every lesson we've run has been incident-free, and we work hard to keep it that way.

What a few people said after

The voucher