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Video: You won’t believe how tight rally stages can be

03rd August 2021
Ben Miles

It’s quite easy to watch the gravel stages of the WRC and think “where do they find these roads?” The majority of the roads we drive down in our day to day lives simply look nothing like those attacked by the world’s best rally drivers, so the disconnect is not too surprising.

The better way to look at these gravel tracks is that you’re far more likely to spend time walking down them, treating them as your local footpath, than ever driving on them – unless you happen to work in forestry or live in an achingly cute countryside cottage.

To showcase this, watch the onboard we have here. Rally driver Sean Johnston is getting some testing in with co-driver Alex Kihurani, ready for the ultra-tight tracks that Italy’s round of the WRC uses on the island of Sardinia.

It is instantly pretty bonkers to see how fast Johnston is willing to drive through these impossibly tight confines. But keep watching and you’ll find that the stage in use throws more and more obstacles into the mix. First comes even tighter roads, ones that you wonder how the car can even fit down, then walls, actual stone walls complete with buildings attached, and finally, some big old cliffs just the other side of the bushes at the side of the track.

It’s a brilliant display of just how talented, just how brave rally drivers really, really are.

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