Ouninpohja, Finland is a quiet wood with a lazy dirt road winding through it which turns into a racetrack when the World Rally Championship comes to town. Red Bull’s Volkswagen Polo R has won the race here three times. Today, it has some traffic on its tail.
Red Bull also sponsors some of the most successful trucks in off-road racing trucks. And I don’t mean “trucks” like the buggies-with-pickup-bodies you see in Baja (though there are Red Bull-branded Trophy Trucks too). These 10 ton Kamaz rigs are serious commercial-sized cargo haulers, gutted and bolstered and inflated to almost 1,000 horsepower.
For some awesome reason, Red Bull decided their Finnish rally champ Jari-Matti Latvala needed a little fear breathing down his neck for this exposition run, so they sic’d 2015 Dakar Rally truck champ Ayrat Mardeev of Russia after him in this Kamaz 4326.
“When you accelerate in the car, the power goes down so quickly that it takes some time for the truck to catch up. But the funny thing is that under braking, when the truck is coming a bit closer, you really feel like you want to run away. You don’t want it to touch you,” Latvala said after this shoot.
Apparently Red Bull’s video concept was to recreate Duel, a dark and weird movie about an anonymous trucker that terrorizes a traveling salesman on a deserted highway for a couple hours. This chase video is a little less creepy.