Dakar rally now features mid-air collisions

Teams participating in the 2021 Dakar Rally apparently now have to add helicopter crashes to the rally’s list of dangers. As if Dakar weren’t dangerous enough already.

Watch this Kamaz take a slight lift after rolling over a dune at high speed, to cut the sideslip of a low-flying press helicopter:

The scene took place in the 12th and final stage of the rally, along the Yanbu-Jeddah road in Saudi Arabia. The truck you see here is from the KAMAZ-master team, and it was driven by Anton Shibalov.

Think how quickly Kamaz was going to ignore an entire helicopter like that, never missing a beat. This platform is definitely not the right combination of mass and inertia to spoil. Someone should tell the helicopter pilot to respect anything that big, go that fast.

Despite the brawl with the rotary-wing aircraft, the Russian team’s # 501 truck finished second in the final stage of the event, and another KAMAZ-master truck, # 507, came in. first. This led the team to victory and marks its 18th overall victory in the Dakar Rally.

A record like this is sure all the bangs and scuffs are worth it for the winners. In fact, the damage to the truck was by no means serious and the chopper skidding does not appear to have damaged the cab of the truck. Although I don’t think the structural integrity of the truck was ever in question.

The next question is more relevant: what happened to the helicopter? In the video, we see the helicopter moving away quickly after cutting the truck. And it doesn’t appear to have suffered any major damage. The truck gets more cover in the clip than the plane, but we can see that the helicopter pilot has learned the lesson and then hangs back a bit, letting the Kamaz leap forward.

We are happy that the helicopter was not imbalanced enough to cause a crash. Things could have ended very badly. But it ended happily – if not for the helicopter, then certainly for the truck.