Guerlain Chicherit is the whole show. He is nuts, and we applaud him for it. Guerlain is a celebrity in the rally car world, and now, because of his totally badass crash that would make Evel Knievel jealous, he is a celebrity of the world.
It takes a lot of guts to do what Guerlain did, and even more for him to declare that he will try it again after he crashed and failed. What he did was a jump, the largest jump ever attempted in a rally car.
He embarked on an adventure into the unknown. He danced with the devil and the devil bit back. Racing wasn’t enough for him, he wanted to fly.
In the mountains of Tinges, France, Guerlain roared down a snowy hill onto a stretch of packed and groomed snow. Out of his horizon line comes a black slab of death, growing larger, until he is face to face with the moment of trial. Off he goes, soaring high over, easily clearing a few scattered cars below, only he’s gone too high or too fast because he is also easily clearing the point of the landing he should be coming down upon. His car begins to tuck over on itself, and his nose lurches down. It is his nose that strikes the landing, sending his car into a tizzy of flips, rolls, and spins. Bits of debris from the car settle into the snow like silt in a delta.
To the relief of his wife and daughter, Guerlain Chicherit, miraculously, is alive. He’s lucky a man named John Alley came along in 1964 and showed the world the first roll cage. Many have improved upon the design since then, but without a roll cage, Guerlain would have been flattened by his car completely buckling into itself.
The crash happened back in March, but GoPro has just released a video of it that is quite miraculous.
I could never do what he did. I keep my thrills to rollercoaster rides. However, I believe that the fire in his heart that drives him forward is as examplerary of courage as the world’s astronaughts. Guerlain Chicherit is more than a rally car racer and a crash celebrity , he is a hero.
