Video: 17 minutes of awesome Monte Carlo onboard by Ogier and Ingrassia

No matter how well captured and/or produced a piece of action footage is, you can rarely sense the continuous need for speed unless we’re talking onboard cameras. Even then it’s easy to mess up if you position the camera too far back or too high and above the wipers area of activity, or you use wide angle lens and destroy the immersion factor. But sometimes all the factors click and we’re treated to a masterpiece of onboard-ism.

For example, the terrifying first day of Rallye Monte Carlo, special stage number 4. The road was barely wide enough for a car, was wet and slippery and terrible.

“I could probably do that in another universe, if properly trained and fed”, I thought to myself as I watched Sebastien Ogier and Julien Ingrassia storm their way through the opening sections. “I mean, it’s slippery and he is going in 6th gear, but I could maybe do it. Once.”

Then came the uphill section and wet tarmac turned into wet tarmac with slush. “Now this is a bit more iffy. I could probably do this never maybe not even then. Unless 1 in a million things happened and I somehow manage to drive as fast as him on the road which is as horrible as this. But probably not.”

Next up, the downhill section and that’s when and where I gave up my fantasy of maybe, in another universe, being able to do the stuff that Seb, Julien and a selected few others were able to do few days ago.

Do watch this, it’s fantastic tribute to balls and skills of modern day WRC drivers. Pay attention to 48 second mark, that bit of understeer looked kinda creepy!