The Walther Arms drift car is not your grandfather’s gun-company sponsorship. It’s a tire-smoking, 100-mph sideways play for the next generation of firearms fans, and it might be one of the smartest brand moves in the gun world right now.
Gun companies have sponsored NASCAR race teams for decades. But Walther’s move into grassroots drifting shows how far firearms brands are willing to go to reach younger shooters where they already are: cars, action sports, social media and full-throttle spectacle.
How the Walther Arms Drift Car Happened
“Guys who like cool s***, like cool s***,” says Chris Long, Walther Arms marketing director, summing up the 140-year-old gunmaker’s new marketing philosophy. “So, whether that’s guns, cars, parasailing, we just wanna meet people where they’re at—doing action sports.”
It’s as good a sign as any that firearms enthusiasts in 2026 aren’t your traditional “gun people.” They’re people who crave action and excitement in every part of life, and as firearms brands look to capture a new audience, they’re moving into spaces they haven’t traditionally been. In the case of Walther Arms, that means the wild world of drifting.
That’s right, drifting—the fringe sport you probably only remember from that one Fast and Furious movie that didn’t have Paul Walker, Vin Diesel or Ludacris.
It’s grown considerably since its underground street-racing origins and now has its own competitive circuits in Formula Drift and Red Bull.
Despite its growth, drifting is still relatively accessible in the motorsports world when compared to NASCAR or IndyCar.
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That makes it the logical place for a company like Walther Arms to try something new.
“Guys can go build a drift car in their garage, that’s not something you can do with NASCAR,” says Long. “It also gives us an experience we can offer to our sponsors and vendors.
Let’s say we got a NASCAR, we can’t send (a sponsor) to go ride in it because NASCAR doesn’t allow it. With the drift car, if you meet us at an event as a customer, we’ll throw you in the passenger seat, and you can go ripping a hundred miles an hour sideways.”
READ MORE: Riding Shotgun With No. 3 NASCAR Driver Austin Dillon
What Is Drifting, Exactly?
Drifting is, in its essence, a controlled oversteer, where the back end of your car kicks out and skids, causing lots of smoke and plenty of noise.
It’s probably happened to you when you tried to take a corner too fast in the rain, or attempted driving in snow when you weren’t prepared. Of course, your drifts probably weren’t going at 100 miles an hour. These are.
“Whatever you think it’d be like floating around on ice, it’s not the same,” says Caleb Quanbeck, Walther Arms’ drift driver. “It’s violent, it’s loud, there’s a lot of smoke. It’s a lot more violent than people expect.”
Competitive circuits like Formula Drift and Red Bull pit drivers against each other in a tournament-style bracket, where drivers are judged and scored like smoke-filled figure skaters.
Most of what the Walther Arms team does is drift exhibitions, freeing the company from image constraints that come from winning and losing.
Why the Walther Arms Drift Car Fits Grassroots Motorsports
“What we do is grassroots drifting, it’s not competitive,” Quanbeck says. “Then we’re not really tied to any wins or losses. Nobody can be like, ‘Oh, the Walther NASCAR took last place.’”
But the Walther car isn’t exactly spinning around abandoned parking lots at 3 a.m., either. While drifting is definitely popular among amateurs, the sport’s growth has brought it to racetracks—during the daytime—for exhibitions like Fuel Fest and Grid Life.
“We went from being on the street—not even the street, we’re talking like Amazon warehouse parking lots—in 2015, to being able to go to the racetrack and driving with some of the best drivers in the world,” Quanbeck says. “Drifting is one of those sports, you don’t really have to understand what’s going on to enjoy watching it. It’s like Monster Jam.”
Caleb Quanbeck’s Road From BMX to Firearms
Quanbeck got his start as a professional BMX rider and found drifting through friends in the BMX world. As Long said, guys who are into cool shit are into cool shit.
“I thought it was cool because it was the only motor sport that followed along with what we did in BMX, which is just freestyle,” Quanbeck says. “It’s not a race with drifting, it’s a very much personalized motor sport where your style can vary tremendously between each driver.”
He was a casual drifter in his late teens and early twenties until 2016, when he started a drifting YouTube channel to raise money for his car. The channel paid him enough to support his drifting career, and Quanbeck built himself a reputation within the community. Then in 2017, he learned he was about to become a father, and his interest suddenly changed—to firearms.
“I was about to have a daughter, and I lived in Florida at the time, and I was like, I gotta get a gun,” he says. “I bought a gun and went out to my backyard and set up some pop cans. I stood about 5 feet away and couldn’t hit anything.
"I thought, oh, this gun’s a piece of crap, so I went back to the store and got a different gun. Went back to my pop cans, still couldn’t hit ‘em, and I decided that, oh, it’s me. I’m the problem.”
Quanbeck Takes His Firearms Journey to YouTube
This Taylor Swift revelation sent Quanbeck headlong down the rabbit hole of YouTube firearms education. He found what anyone who’s gone down that rabbit hole finds: There’s some good information, and a whole lot of bad information.
So, he linked up with a private security officer friend who taught him how to shoot a pistol properly, and Quanbeck’s passion for firearms was born. To help others who were learning to shoot, he began posting gun content on his YouTube channel.
Ultimately, it ended his drifting career.
“I wanted other people to get out and train with their firearms; it just consumed me. I wanted people to have the experience that I was having as I learned and progressed,” he says.
“But around the time I started sharing my passion in training and owning firearms, my YouTube channel took a huge hit, and that was my only monetary income.”
So, Quanbeck disbanded his drift team and went all-in on firearms, taking a job as an auto mechanic to support his family and posting gun content on Instagram.
In 2020, he was laid off during the pandemic and began producing promotional videos for companies. As income from that project rolled in, his wife encouraged him to get back in the drifting game.
“I started building this car, and I thought how cool it would be if I could get a firearms company to sponsor my car, bridging this gap of enthusiasts,” he says. “Because all my friends who are into cars are also into guns.”
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How the Walther Arms Drift Car Bridges Guns and Motorsports
Quanbeck was introduced to Long through a mutual friend in Alaska. After a half-hour conversation, the two realized they were on the verge of a revolutionary partnership between firearms and motorsports.
“There’d been a couple of companies like Winchester or Remington who sponsored NASCAR before, but there was no driver attached to that firearm,” Quanbeck says. “But this works so much better because I’m a shooter, so I can be the name and the face of the brand.”
“It was the hardest of hard sells,” Long recalls of trying to convince Walther’s higher-ups that a drift car was a good idea. “But we really wanted to de-Fudd the perception of getting into guns, make it a little less frightening for people that might be gun curious.
"All those guys who did skating or BMX back in the early ’90s, they’re in their 30s and 40s now. They’ve all got families, and they probably, on some level, always thought guns were cool.
“We all grew up with guns in movies, and James Bond helped with that. But Bond fans die by the day. So, we gotta do something that keeps us looking not so long-in-the-tooth. We’ve gotta keep engaging with a younger, buyer-heavy audience. So, we brought in the drift car. And it’s been hugely successful for us; people love it everywhere we bring it.”
Since Walther Arms began sponsoring Quanbeck and his car in 2024, several other companies have jumped on board, either co-sponsoring the car or sponsoring cars of their own.
Big names like Huxwrx, Silencer Shop and Geissele. One competitor even tried to poach Quanbeck from the Walther team, which clearly didn’t fly.
“It’s been wildly successful. Nobody else was doing this, but now they are,” Long says. “And I think you’re gonna see a lot more people looking for these different avenues to reach new buyers, as opposed to just selling guns to gun people.”
Where to See the Walther Arms Drift Car in 2026
If you want to catch Caleb Quanbeck and the Walther Arms drift car, they’ll be at a Grid Life event in South Haven, Michigan, June 12-14. They’ll also be at LS Fest Texas, May 15-16 at the Texas Motor Speedway; and LS Fest Kentucky, September 11-13 in Bowling Green.
“It is an exhibition, essentially, where drivers that have been approved to drive the event go out and put on a show for the 20,000-plus fans,” Quanbeck says.
“There’s music, big EDM or rap people performing for a huge number of spectators. And the pits are open, so when people come by the pit, they can see all of our swag.”
The events are fan-friendly, accessible, and get you up close and personal with the drivers. And if you’re a guy who’s into cool shit—which you are since you’re reading this magazine—drifting is definitely for you.