ISUZU MOMENTS
GARLAND’S CAR LANDS
Bruce Garland breaks his spine in the 2011 Dakar Rally, finishes the stage anyway. hat would you do if you’d just driven off a nine-metre high, dune-sided ravine in Chile? Bruce Garland pinned the throttle. “What happened was, we’d had a bit of a drama about two hours before that, when I’d missed a turn into a big washaway,” says Garland today. “So we were trying to make up a few spots. As we raced into the dunes I was watching ahead and it looked dead flat.” Spoiler: it wasn’t. “The road just dropped away into a vertical ravine, a sheer drop, that was two or three stories high. Then it came back up and levelled out, which meant that from our angle it looked like there was nothing there. “The D-MAX was accelerating as it was going down,” he says. “I thought, shit, I don’t want to get stuck down the
bottom here! So I kept a bit of throttle on, hoping that when it hit the bottom I could drive back up again. But that just made the impact even worse.” The landing was so massive that the D-MAX’s engine snapped its mounts before the vehicle bounced up and out of the hole. Garland pulled over. The D-MAX was bashed up. Navigator Harry Suzuki was bruised, too. Garland was battered. The Australian rally legend had enjoyed a run of form coming into the 2011 Dakar rally. He’d finished 11th in 2009 and had been eyeing the 9000km route from Argentina to Chile with relish. “We’d had a lot of success,” he says. “We’d won some big desert races in our class, raced all through Asia— it was quite a busy time.” Garland, incredibly, did not send out
a distress call; if you call for medical assistance in the Dakar, your race is over. “We bounced out, but then we couldn’t breathe, so we stopped,” he says. Instead, he laid on the sand dune and necked some Panadol. Eventually a random fan emerged to help Suzuki tie the engine back down and Garland drove—very gingerly—the 30km to the end of that leg, Stage 5. Bruce’s race was, of course, finished. That night, medics would inform him of the damage: a fractured spine and busted ribs. He’d also had a heart attack, which doctors would miss for months, until he had another. He’d spend a week in hospital in Atacama, and a year recovering. Then he’d climb back behind the wheel. “That impact was massive,” cackles Garland. “But how tough was the ute?”
The road just dropped away into a vertical ravine, a sheer drop, that was two or three stories high, then it came back up and levelled out. From our angle it looked like there was nothing there. MAX*D GO YOUR OWN WAY
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