1000-HP Mercedes-Benz Limo Has Turbos Bigger Than Your Face, Perfect For Proms

There's something beautiful about the doldrums of winter and how they create some of the most incredible project cars in the world. Northern Europeans seem to take advantage of this time best, using long dark winter days to create the wildest big-power vehicles you've ever seen, and then just doing fun stuff with them. The Drift Limo for instance, started out as a mid-2000s Mercedes-Benz E-class limousine, and now it's packed with over 1,000 horsepower via a twin-turbocharged 6.0-liter Corvette motor. Bolt some studded snow tires on that beast and see how fast it'll rip up a black diamond ski slope!

Earlier this year, the German hooligans at RD48 put on an incredible event called Ice King Battle, which was basically a head-to-head knock-out style drag racing event with a little twist. This drag race wasn't held on a paved quarter-mile track; it was on snow and ice, and it went straight up a black diamond ski hill. Doesn't that just sound like the best time you could possibly have? Point it uphill and pin it, let that bad boy rip, and don't let out of the throttle until you reach the top. Come on, how did Americans let Germany invent this event?

The Mercedes Limo was once intended as a stately way to arrive at a movie premiere, an evening on the town, or even a swanky mid-90s high-school prom. These days, the Mercedes has had its raison d'être flipped on its head, and couldn't be anything further from stately. This is now a hooligan machine built for shredding tires and going fast. With the exhaust dumps straight up through the hood and the occasional flame shooting, it's going to get you the wrong kind of attention at a black-tie event.

Backfire Brad's drift limo is something of a celebrity in some sections of the automotive world, and I actually got an opportunity to poke around the thing when it visited the U.S. for a trip to SEMA last fall. The build quality is truly incredible, blending some of the coolest engineering with one of the most unlikely performance platforms on the planet. Car culture should certainly embrace this level of chaotic joy and endeavor to make more stuff like this possible.

Now that it's back in Europe, the car is back to the business of burning way more gasoline than the average person really should, and delighting crowds in the process. Although if enough people piled in this thing and went on a road trip, it might actually be more efficient on a per-person basis than a Prius with one dude in the driver's seat — but I'll leave that math up to the internet. If you want to be an eco king and an Ice King, then maybe this is the right car for the job, provided you're always hauling a load of people in the back. It's already mostly the right shade of yellow, so it's giving off some school bus vibes anyway.

The builder said on Instagram that the car was basically slapped together in just four months in order to make it to the SEMA show, so it's still a bit rough around the edges. Hopefully, with the luxury of time and effort, it'll end up as a finely polished monster machine eventually. Based on the video of it screaming up the mountain at full chat, it already seems pretty well mechanically sorted to me. It might not be the wildest limo conversion ever, but it's definitely the coolest. I want an opportunity to rip it. Or maybe a drift limo of my own.