Lightning McQueen Drifting

Submission 7,226

Part of a series on Cars (film franchise). [View Related Entries]

About

Lightning McQueen Drifting refers to a series of exploitable image macros using two screenshots of Lightning McQueen from the last race scene of the Pixar animated film Cars drifting by two other racers. The image became a popular object-labeling format on Reddit in March 2021.

Origin

On September 9th, 2019, u/Catalyst138 posted an image macro to /r/HistoryMemes^[1] featuring a screenshot from the Pixar animated film Cars of protagonist Lightning McQueen drifting behind two other cars as if he's lost control, garnering over 1,500 upvotes in 18 months (shown below). On September 12th, the same user posted a blank template to /r/MemeTemplates,^[2] garnering over 4,000 upvotes in a comparable span of time.

On September 13th, u/TheDiv posted a new version of the meme to /r/memes^[3] with an additional lower panel from later in the scene, where Lightning McQueen manages to drift past the other two racers and into the lead (shown below). The post garnered over 21,300 upvotes in 18 months and became the dominant Lightning McQueen drifting format going forward. On September 14th, u/OG-Dreadful uploaded an HD template of the format to /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial.^[5]

The scene, taken from the climax of 2006's Cars, can be seen below, uploaded to YouTube^[4] in 2014.

Spread

The format saw occasional use over the course of the next year, gaining significant attention on meme subreddits like /r/dankmemes around March 11th.

For example, on March 11th, Redditor u/RegularNoodles posted a version of the meme referencing Pokemon to /r/dankmemes,^[6] garnering over 81,700 upvotes in a day (shown below, left). On the same day, u/xDiji posted another version /r/dankmemes^[7] about hackers, garnering over 76,800 upvotes in a comparable span of time (shown below, right).

Later that day, u/LordPrestonOfRome posted a version of the meme to /r/dankmemes^[8] referencing Kanye West's run for president, and the Deez Nuts 2016 campaign, garnering over 78,000 upvotes in 14 hours (shown below).