English stunt driver and general behind-the-wheel-badass Russ Swift once held the record for parallel parking a car in the smallest space between two others. He did it, naturally, in a Mini, with the aid of a handbrake turn. The German who just reset the new record in a considerably smaller space used the same technique.
Ronny Wechselberger pulled off the parking stunt with just 26 centimeters more space than the length of his Volkswagen Polo. Swift had previously done it in 33 centimeters back in 2007 (video here) and it has been slowly edged down in 1-cm steps since. Who will be the next driver to re-set the record? How low can the margin for error go? Will we eventually see someone "hand-braking" a mag-lev electric car into a space only millimeters longer than the car itself? We sure hope so.
