With tinsel? And baubles? But on a beach? I remember the first time someone told me that an Australian Christmas was in the middle of summer. Out with sprouts, figgy pudding, snow on the ground and a fire in the grate. In with a BBQ, some surfing and factor 50. Never had I heard of anything so incongruous.
Second on my personal list of dissonance, however, is a Dakar car in the snow. Driving something everyone associates with sand but sliding about in the slush with the wipers flailing at falling flakes, is a weird experience. That was on an off-road course in Germany in 2010 in a VW Race Touareg. Today I’m in an only marginally less ludicrous location for a Dakar car: a stately home in Sussex. You know the one. The vehicle in question this time is a freshly unveiled Ford Raptor T1+, developed with M-Sport in Cumbria to tackle the 47th edition of the famous rally raid in 2025. Where they found a veil big enough I have no idea. It towers comically over Group C Le Mans cars and makes even a modern F1 car look diminutive.
Ford obviously has a long history with F1, Le Mans, NASCAR and the WRC, but it has also competed in extreme off-road events like Baja and King of the Hammers in North America and has stated that it wants to be seen to be building the toughest cars in the world. And that last word is crucial.
