Listen to Meeke’s co-driver as they spear into a parking lot, win anyway

“JESUS Christ, Kris!” Aren’t words you want to hear when you’ve nailed the throttle pedal to the firewall, your rally car bucking and kicking as it steps out sideways, and a packed car park hoves into view.

Footage has emerged of what went down inside the cabin of Kris Meeke’s Citroen C3 rally car after he fired it off the road while leading last weekend’s Rally Mexico less than a kilometre from the finish.

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Amazingly, despite finding himself in a public car park and pointing the wrong way, Meeke is relatively calm as he narrowly avoids parked cars during the unexpected excursion.

The above outburst came from the Irishman’s co-driver, Paul Nagle, in the moment before Meeke’s car abandoned the road.

“How am I gonna get out of here?” is Meeke’s calm response as he casually drifts the Citroen around the parked cars.

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Nagle responds with “I dunno” before he finally identifies an exit point and Meeke gets back on course and powers towards the finish line.

Their reactions at the end of the stage – Meeke was leading the rally with a comfortable 37.2sec buffer when he went off – are priceless as they try and work out if they’d blown their chances of taking the stage and the overall victory.

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“Holy s**t,” says Nagle. “We lost it,” replies a clearly disappointed Meeke. “Did we?” questions Nagle.

Turns out they didn’t, sneaking home with a 13.8sec buffer. Talk about the luck of the Irish.