Rock Beats Axle

There’s plenty of crashing at the Dakar Rally, and in off-road racing in general, but you don’t get a dramatic axle-eating wipeout in a well-framed video too often. It’s painful to watch, but also, kind of neat.

Here we can see what looks like a Toyota factory-backed Hilux race car cut a corner a little too close. An unstoppable force (the truck) hits an immovable object (a big sharp rock) and the Earth tears the vehicle’s axle right out. Ouch.

Thankfully the doors open quickly and the Toyota’s pilots appear to have gotten out, but that certainly looked like a circuit-scrambling stack. The vehicle almost got wrecked again during its recovery!

Be careful out there, folks. No corner-cutting.