This Isn’t Where I Parked my Car…

Yo… BP here. Little Caster, faithful lobster, lobbed this up to me… and I had literally never heard of Rally Car races in France. “Rallye de France” They’re a big deal over there. Professional drivers. Massive events. Since he’s the expert… he ran with it like a champ. His first guest post, good stuff:

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I know what y’all are thinking – This dude obviously doesn’t know that brakes come standard in cars, even rally cars… but I’m gonna go ahead and blame the GPS on this one. After all, Petter Solberg is a professional driver and GPSs are notorious for faulty directions.  Gotta be “computer error” here, right?   Soo, I’m gonna guess this is what was not shown by the in-car camera before we see its footage.  Petter obviously hit the “alternate route” button.

“Re-calculating: ‘In .1 kilometers, drift off-road right, then continue straight through vineyard into power pole. Windshield-wipe debris off, then check rearview mirror and back out. Find road and continue race along paved route. Arrive at finish line in 100 meters.’”   Perfect. Victory ahead.

Petter must have been that kid who dominated Simon Says in grammar school gym – peerless at following directions. A+ on this one, dude.

“Good at following directions” must be a prerequisite for this rally car team. Petter’s teammate not only spots the raceway ahead for Petter after they deracinate that power pole, he points it out, just for reinforcement.

Guy who called shotgun: “The road is up there.”

Petter: “Ahh, I see it. We’re all good.”

Yeaahhhh, we’re all good… It’s not like you just ruined a patch of some winemaker’s over priced French wine that you’re probably going to be billed for.

And it’s also not like that falling power pole almost:

1) set the whole vineyard ablaze

2) blew up another car

3) killed the spectator who wanted to get a close up view of the accident… who, by the way, maybe should have been hit by that tree. He’ll be an a honorable mention in next year’s copy of the Darwin Awards, as he unsuccessfully removed himself from the gene pool.  Hey guy, when you see a falling power pole, run away from it.

Racing, no matter which kind, is usually a game of seconds, so braking is conceivably the difference between, to paraphrase Reece and Ricky Bobby — first and last. Braking here though, with windshield visibility percentage equal to somewhere around pi, might not have been a bad idea….

-little caster

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