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'Girl Drifter' Race Driver Freaks Out Instructors In Prank

"It's my brother's car." That's what Leona Chin told four instructors about her high-powered sports car. She then stalled the stick-shift car in first gear and randomly turned the wipers on — before unleashing the skills she has honed as a professional driver. Havoc, and some panic, ensued.

The prank was engineered by the driving school and Malaysia's MaxMan TV; the resulting video has been seen more than 23 million times since it was published late last month. We're posting it here in the spirit of April Fools' Day. (It's more interesting than most of the jokes we're seeing out there.)

We'll caution you that the video seems to include a brief outburst of profanity, after Chin smokes the tires and hurls the car into a precise figure-eight.

"Do not underestimate women," MaxMan wrote when it first posted the video featuring Chin, who calls herself the "Girl Drifter."

For the prank, both Chin and one of her cars underwent a transformation. Her hair was put into pigtails, and she wore thick-rimmed glasses. Instead of her usual fire suit, she wore a SpongeBob SquarePants dress, accented by cheery hair clips. Her car was stripped of its sponsor branding and a rear spoiler; a large stuffed bear was posed in the rear seat.

The prank was reportedly pulled on the instructors' first day on the job. All of them seemed eager to get out of the car afterward — and there were relieved and happy to learn it was all a trick.

"Don't be scared," one of the instructors tells her. "Go faster," she later says.

Chin did that — and in a separate video, she even spun her car around a wide circle, to parallel park it between two other cars.

"I parked inside!" she excitedly told her instructor, who seemed to be hugging himself.

According to Chin's website, she has driven in several endurance and rally races in addition to specializing in drifting events, where drivers speed through a succession of turns by whipping their cars sideways.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Bill Chappell is a writer and editor on the News Desk in the heart of NPR's newsroom in Washington, D.C.