Remember when all of your problems could be solved by throwing down a banana peel, causing your opponent to comically spin out behind you, leading you to victory and temporarily broken friendships? Well that was just Mario Kart, and now you’re an adult, but could it still work in real life?
The folks over at Hoonigan setup a real life banana peel traction test with a 2018 Audi RS5, to see just how effective the fruit skin could be at taking out a car.
They tried launching the car on the bananas, where there was the most impact on traction, as well as multiple, so many, skids through the small field of peels to see if there was any crippling impact on the car’s performance.
Spoiler alert, the banana peels were no match for the all-wheel drive, 1,633kg 444 horsepower performance car. While there was a little bit of a slip, it seems like you would need a lot more banana peels to foil your enemy’s dreams of victory and glory. It may also help if they’re in a powerful, rear-wheel drive car that’s much more likely to slip up.
I get the feeling this test is incomplete, so hopefully they keep trying. It would be very handy to know just how much banana I need to eat to win a race in the future.