Drifting
Rhys Millen Uses Stunt Driving to Be Race Ready
From drifting his way around Baccarat crystal for Lexus to setting Pikes Peak International Hill Climb records.
Rhys Millen’s career driving cars has been far more than racing. While Millen has competed in everything from Red Bull Global Rallycross to drifting to racing up Pikes Peak smashing records, he's done just as much stunt driving. Spending time behind the wheel for various car and insurance commercials as well as the Fast and Furious franchise.
The beauty of it all for Millen is that he gets the opportunity to work on his skills away from the pressures that loom in a racing environment. After catching word that he was behind the wheel in the latest Lexus High Performance commercial, we gave him a call to chat about what’s been happening in his world, working with Lexus and what it’s like to go back and forth from stunt driver to racer.
RedBull.com: With 2017 well underway, what have you been up to so far, Rhys?
Rhys Millen: Well, we have a few fun projects that we’re working on. For the last couple years from the stunt driving side of things I’ve been involved in a campaign with Pennzoil/Shell lubricants, filming some short films in various high-performance vehicles from around the world.
The last two years we’ve been to Cape Town, South Africa, up in the snow of Calgary [Canada] and through the streets of Barcelona, Spain. The campaign continues this year and we just finished the first installment, in a location that I can’t expose right now and we have two more lined up over the next four to five months.
Rhys Millen
© Christian Pondella / Red Bull Content Pool
Between that there are lots of other performance car commercials, every week I’m behind the wheel of various manufacturer cars, either stunt driving, crashing for an insurance commercial or doubling for a guy who doesn’t know how to drive a manual. [Laughs]
Then we have the racing projects as well that will have us returning to Pikes Peak. We’ll be challenging some of the top off-road races in the U.S., one of them being Vegas to Reno and then the big one to cap off the year will be celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the Baja 1000.
You’ve been stunt driving for commercials and films quite a bit over your career. What's the transition like to go from racer to stunt man and vice versa?
The two industries have really enabled me to rehearse and hone my skills as a driver. I’ve been fortunate enough in my relationship with Lexus to have done a large portion of their stunt driving for many years. I enjoy driving all of their top line products, the LFA supercar, the RC F and the new LC 500, which I drove for their "Man and Machine" Super Bowl commercial.
More recently we shot a commercial with the LC 500, RC F and GS F inside a pristine gallery full of expensive crystal. The idea was to showcase the raw power and refined precision of these Lexus vehicles, as we ripped and drifted around the crystal obstacle course, sometimes within inches, without knocking over a single piece.
Stunt driving is an opportunity to rehearse the same maneuver multiple times for film, so that as a driver you’re constantly adapting and manipulating slight inputs from steering, throttle and brake to find the sweet spot that allows the car to perform. That’s the commercial side of things.
Stunt driving in a warehouse full of Baccarat
© Lexus
For the racing side of things, stunt driving allows you to become very smooth and precise, while the racing really pushes the envelope of precision and pressure, which gives you confidence when you’re on a commercial set. There’s always another memory card and we can always do another take, but you have to be so on point in racing that I try to nail everything in one take when I’m in the commercial environment. They’re both very complementary to each other and it’s very exciting to be involved in both worlds.
It also offers a chance to spend a lot of time in both street and race cars. What are the big differences between drifting a street car as opposed to sliding around in a proper race car?
Well, a typical racer will find one avenue of racing or one craft of driving and that becomes their discipline, be it rally, drifting, road racing or drag racing. What the commercial world has done for me is put me in a different scenario every week. From a front-wheel drive car to a rear-wheel drive car, driving on the side of a sand dune, in the snow in Alaska or on a sticky asphalt floor in a warehouse lined with crystal. So it has really increased my bag of tricks based on how many models of cars that I’ve been exposed to and the situations I get to drive them in. It’s been really rewarding to build up that experience level to be able to hop into anything and perform.
Rhys Millen
© Garth Milan/Red Bull Content Pool
The difference between a full-blown drift car set up for racing and commercial stunt driving is that on the commercial side of things, you’re being hired to represent a manufacturer's product. So in the truth of advertising that vehicle cannot be manipulated any way, form or fashion from a legal standpoint, outside of the controls that are delivered to the general public. So if you’ve got a traction control button, you can use it. Modern cars these days are being fitted with electric parking and foot brakes, traction control and stability control aids that are making the stunt driving side of things very, very difficult.
When you come into the racing side of things, you’re building a drift car specifically to drift; to spin the tires as fast as you can, to control the car as sideways as you can and to give it as much grip as you can, all with modified suspension and steering.
The Lexus commercials always seem to showcase their cars at the highest level of performance. What’s it been like to work with the brand?
I would say through my partnership and driving with them, the agency and the client are probably the most willing and itchy group to push the envelope of performance. I think their advertising and how they portray the performance of their cars is what’s setting the tone for the product being so successful. In a modern world where elegance, style and performance are so important, you can’t showcase your product in any other way than really letting it loose. It’s an encouraging element to be associated with a brand that is confident enough to show their cars in that light, because realistically you’re showing performance and control and a lot of manufacturers will steer well away from that circle because they feel that you’re displaying a "hooning" element of it you could say.
In the most recent Lexus stunt, you were tasked with drifting around crystal cases. What ran through your mind when you heard that some of the Baccarat vases cost upward of $1,600?
I was confident enough in the car's balance and performance to be able to place it close to the crystal objects. I'm pretty sure the agency was more scared than I was, because they let out a big cheer after we did that stunt.
Rhys Millen
© Lexus
What was scarier: destroying the crystal or the cars?
My concern is always for the safety of the crew operating the camera and the car. I'm hired by the client and agency to look after the car and most of the time they are prototype cars, as in this video [with] the LC 500. Of course my focus is not to damage anything, but I would be more bummed if I hurt the car over the crystal.