2021 Update During my internship at W&B I got the opportunity to revisit this project: Teaching an RC car to do donuts with deep RL.

A few years back, I saw this video where MIT researchers made an RC car drift by itself. I had no idea how it was done but thought it was very cool.
Fast forward to April 2020 where I saw this tweet showing a very fast autonomous RC car. It revived my interest and I researched the subject, built an Nvidia Jetracer car and hacked together an implementation of the original paper.
I trained straight in the real world and it kind of works!