French rider goes one better than SuperVan

Frenchman Guerlain Chicherit (34), a professional skier
and rally driver, executes the first backflip in a Mini
Countryman

SOUTH African racing legend Sarel van der Merwe once rolled a rally car — in mid air.

In his biography, SuperVan and I, he tells how the car executed a lazy barrel roll high over a pine tree, which scratched a door handle, and then landed on its wheels.

SuperVan raced on, later leaving the mechanics mystified as to how the deep scratch could have been made.

Now Frenchman Guerlain Chicherit (34), professional skier and rally driver, has gone one better. 

He is the first driver this side of the newly discovered exoplanet Kepler-37b (some 210 light-years from Earth) to execute a perfect backflip in a car and then manage a perfect landing. All without any mechanical trickery or fancy camera work.

Chicherit flipped his Mini Countryman last weekend at Tignes, a winter sports resort in France built for the 1992 Winter Olympics freestyle skiing competition.

Mini said the ramp fits the same template as a quarterpipe on a freestyle snowboarding course.

— WWR.