“Don’t stop me, I’m on a roll”

Driving off-road is a mostly slow and precise art. Lots of creeping descents, cocked wheels and silly angles. Get it wrong, and you could be trapped in a lonely furrow for weeks, eating the seats while prodding your emergency satphone. Or, you could be Liam Doran. He prefers to surf the soil in a supercharged frenzy, slotting his two-tonne race truck into the grooves and ploughing through as fast as possible. He’s really not the sort of bloke who gets stuck in a rut.

But what happens when 900bhp meets lumpy dirt at motorway speeds? The ruts become ramps. And long drifts become short flights, such as the one above. It happened in qualifying for the final 2011 round of the American off-road race series at Firebird Raceway, Arizona. Liam was pretty much on his own out there – no argy bargy, no traffic, nobody else to blame. “It happens a lot in short-course off-road racing – mainly because the tracks are so rough,” he tells us.

“I basically got slightly out of shape in the previous section, and that upset the entry into the corner.” So instead of going with the ruts, he bumped into them, which bounced the car up
and into the air.

We haven't got a video of this incident, but check out Liam rolling around at Lydden Hill a couple of years ago.