Nairobi, Jan. 29 -- The dramatic and life-threatening 160 kilometres per hour crash by world rally champion Ott Tanak's Hyundai i20 at last weekend's Monte Carlo Rally served two notices: One, that a modern World Rally Championship car is engineered with safety a huge priority and, two, underneath the "softie" look associated with road-going machines like the Toyota Vitz - the WRC Toyota Yaris brand equivalent - racing cars today are mean machines packed with cutting edge technology and military standard hardware engineered to withstand crashes, rolls and safeguard the human life caged inside a matrix of steel or tubular frames.
The safety aspects of modern cars, as proved by Tanak's crash, saved the sport from the ignominy of taking the s...