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| Frenchman Guerlain Chicherit (34), a professional skier and rally driver, executes the first backflip in a Mini Countryman |
SOUTH African racing legend Sarel van der Merwe once rolled a rally
car — in mid air.
In his biography, SuperVan and I, he tells how the
car executed a lazy barrel roll high over a pine tree, which scratched a door
handle, and then landed on its wheels.
SuperVan raced on, later leaving the mechanics mystified as to how
the deep scratch could have been made.
He is the first driver this side of the newly
discovered exoplanet Kepler-37b (some 210 light-years from Earth) to execute a
perfect backflip in a car and then manage a perfect landing. All without any
mechanical trickery or fancy camera work.
Chicherit flipped his Mini Countryman last weekend at Tignes, a
winter sports resort in France built for the 1992 Winter Olympics freestyle
skiing competition.
Mini said the ramp fits the same template as a quarterpipe on a
freestyle snowboarding course.
— WWR.
