Guy Wilks is expected to make a full recovery after fracturing two vertebrae in an accident on the opening stage of the Rally d’Italia-Sardegna, Round 5 of theIntercontinental Rally Challenge.
The 29-year old Darlington driver was making the most of his favourable starting position of running seventh on the road, when a wrongly written pace note saw him slide off the road on a fast sixth-gear corner, 7kms into the stage.
His Škoda UK Motorsport Fabia S2000 left the road at high speed, flying down an incline and landing on a large boulder. The impact with the bottom front section of the car launched it into the air, before landing and careering through more rocky scrub, eventually coming to a halt 40 metres off the road.
Guy got out of the car unaided and immediately laid down on the ground to comfort his back, while his co-driver Phil Pugh, who was uninjured, telephoned the team to start the recovery process.
A medical helicopter arrived quickly to airlift Guy to the nearby town of Oristano, from where he was transferred the short distance to the San Martino Hospital by ambulance.
An x-ray of his lower back revealed that the first and second vertebrae are fractured, although there is no compression or complications.
Guy Wilks: “We had a game plan to make the most of our good road position and push hard from the start. We arrived at an almost flat out left hand corner about seven kilometres into the stage and the pace note was wrong and we left the road at high speed. It’s just one of those things and part of rallying. Perhaps if we weren’t pushing so hard we might have got away with it, but that’s a very big might. Everything felt so right. The car felt good, Phil was doing a great job on the notes and there was no reason not to push. It was a wrong pace note that ultimately caught us out, and it doesn’t matter how well we were going up until then. I’m very annoyed to be lying in a hospital bed and looking at a hospital ceiling, and it’s massively frustrating to be injured and not out there competing. It’s a missed opportunity to score a good result and take home points – I know that, and I’m sorry for the team and everyone involved in the programme. But we’ll be back to fight another day.”
We all wish Guy Wilks a speedy and successful recovery.
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