I played the saxophone in middle school, spending five years of my life huffing and puffing on the horn, learning to read music, and generally annoying the neighbors with practice in the backyard. One thing I learned, though, was that it’s far easier to play music fast than it is to play slow. And the same idea is true with cars. It’s easy to drive fast – to dive through corners and clash through the gears. You just smash the gas and go. But driving slow takes patience and concentration, modulating the muscle movements in your leg. Volkswagen has taken the slow-lane idea and applied it to a drag race between the Golf GTI, up! GTI, and Polo GTI.
More drag races:
The challenge is to see who can drive the slowest to 62 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour). The drivers cannot slow down or maintain speed. They must continuously accelerate up to speed but do it as slow as possible, which sounds impossible. A slight blip of the throttle would quicken any of the three GTI models slow-lane sprint to 62 mph.
The three start out slow, the drivers trying desperately to accelerate slowly. However, the Golf GTI takes off, leaving behind the Polo and up!. You can see as the driver’s try to do their best to accelerate slowly, but someone does have to lose, and it’s the Golf GTI that’s first to reach 62 mph. Next to reach the speed is the up! GTI, leaving the Polo GTI to win. It took the Polo 2:57:05 to reach 62 mph, which feels agonizingly slow considering the car has an advertised 0-62 mph time of 6.7 seconds.
Not every race has to be about speed. Sometimes slow and steady does win the race, like the Polo GTI – or the Hare. It’s doubtful this will become a national pastime, soon. It takes skill to drive slow like this, but it’s not exciting to watch.
Source: Volkswagen Danmark
