Rallying is one of the most dangerous forms of motorsport and the driver and co-driver of one of the M-Sport Ford Puma Rally1 cars were lucky to escape serious injury after a devastating crash during the WRC’s recent round at Rallye Monte-Carlo.
The crash occurred along a stretch of narrow mountain road used in the rally. Onboard footage from the Ford Puma shows driver Adrien Fourmaux drifting wide around a left-hand bend in the road. This error saw him then slam into a rock face on the right side of the road. The car bounced off the rock, started to flip and the barrel rolled over the crash barrier on the side of the road.
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A video taken by a spectator shows the Ford Puma bouncing over the guard rail and soaring through the air, hitting multiple branches of nearby trees, and then finally coming to rest halfway down the cliff face.
The rally car was extensively damaged in the wreck with most of its body panels torn off. Crucially, the extremely strong passenger cell held up, and remarkably, both Fourmaux and his co-driver Alexandre Coria walked away from the devastating crash without injury.
“He has had a very heavy accident by the looks of things,” team principal Richard Millener said in a statement to The Sun immediately following the crash. “From what I can see it looks like quite a dirty corner he has gone to cut the line and I guess the cars in front have pulled a bit of mud out, and he just went head-on into a mountain, and it has just flipped him over the barrier and 20 to 30 meters down the bank.”