Every once in a while, I need to be reminded that I’m not a professional driver. You know who is, though? Oliver Solberg. He’s a Scandinavian fella who competes with Toyota Gazoo Racing in the World Rally Championship. During this past weekend’s Rallye Monte Carlo, Solberg proved his mettle by getting into and, more importantly, out of a hairy situation. His all-wheel-drive GR Yaris slid off the icy course and through a fence, but he used the age-old tactic that, sadly, has never worked for me: When in doubt, throttle out.
You can see the whole sequence here, uploaded to YouTube by Joao Pereira:
Oliver Solberg crash 💥 Rallye Monte Carlo #wrcmontecarlo #rally
His car entered the narrow S section with its tail-end sliding off the road. It took a healthy stomp on the right pedal to get out of that, and it sent him straight into another ditch. It looked like his stage was done for as the race car nearly got high-centered, but pegging the 1.6-liter turbo-four at the rev-limiter was enough to get him going again.
That was only half the battle, though, as Solberg still had to get out of the snowy field he’d wandered into. In a total Forza Horizon move, he simply punched another hole through the fence, ramping the ditch and re-entering the route he’d started on.
I have to say, I’m inspired by Solberg’s persistence. Maybe not enough to get out and try it on our own icy roads here—the Ozarks, where I live, is being hammered with winter weather, much like the rest of the country—but still. All I know is that the one time my friends and I put a Geo Prizm in the ditch doing something a lot like this as teenagers, we didn’t fare so well.
Solberg and his co-driver Elliott Edmondson ended up taking the overall Rallye Monte Carlo victory, thanks in large part to his quick thinking. In fact, the margin to second place was less than a minute. The podium was all Toyotas, so I guess next time I try acting like a hero on some remote, icy road, I’ll make sure I’m driving a WRC-prepped GR Yaris.
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