World records are set as much by technique as by talent. On the face of it, it seems insane to attempt a high jump backwards, yet the 'Fosbury Flop' has won every high-jump competition since American Dick Fosbury used it to win the gold medal at the 1968 Olympics.
Likewise, it's no longer possible to win a parallel-parking competition by parallel parking - you have to go in sideways, tyres squealing, which makes for much better TV than watching a Mr Bean lookalike inching backwards and forwards, a centimetre at a time.
And here's how it's done.
The adjudicators measure the length of your chosen car, and you add the minimum 'parking distance' you think you can get away with, and park two similar cars exactly that total distance apart.
Than you rev up to get your car spinning, grab the handbrake and slide it into the gap between the two parked cars.
If you touch either of them - or the kerb - you're disqualified.
Simple, but not easy, especially given that until recently the standing record, set by Han Yue from China, was 150mm - about the height of a paperback book.
Then British driver John Moffat slid his 1970s-vintage Mini Mayfair into a space just 131mm longer than the car itself, in front of the unflappable Guinness Book of World Records adjudicators, on the set of the TV show 'Officially Amazing'.
But what was really 'officially amazing' was that his older brother Alastair also did it - although neither of them got it right first time, which is why we advise you not to try this on the street where you live.