To be quite fair, there is plenty of reason to not make too much light of Tomasz Kasperczyk’s incident at Rally Islas Canaries. Rally cars, Armco barriers, and cliff faces make for scenes straight from the horrors of real life. There’s even history there, if you consider Henri Toivonen’s fatal accident at Corsica. Any race that has loose surfaces and an easy spot for a car to go “off the side” of anything equals a bad day…there’s a fleet of destroyed cars that have taken the quick way down Pikes Peak to attest to that. But, just like flying in a plane, any landing you walk away from, no matter how bad the damage, is still a good day.

Tomasz Kasperczyk and his co-driver, Damian Syty, found a bit of trouble with the brakes  on one of the stages and wound up stuffing their Ford Fiesta R5 into a guardrail that, if it had failed, would have seen the Ford heading down into a rocky valley. Whoever built that barrier is fully entitled to a free beer at this point, because the Fiesta is corralled and left sitting half-on, half-off of the roadway. Watching them run up the road to notify course managers and the helicopter that they are OK is a good thing, but we imagine that once the adrenaline wore off and they saw the footage, that they were certainly more than a little shaken up.