Andrew Comrie-Picard, a rally racing champion and Hollywood stunt driver, was part of a team that wrapped up a remarkable vehicle expedition across the globe, including both poles, this year.
Shown here are a couple of the vehicles used in the Transglobal Car Expedition, which traveled around the globe across both poles and wrapped up earlier this year.
Comrie-Picard says that the ability to push through challenges seen in extreme sports and expeditioning offers lessons for regular folks.

For Andrew Comrie-Picard, a successful stunt on the set of an action movie starring Charlize Theron represented a "good day at the office."

The 54-year-old rally racing champion and Hollywood stunt driver was manning a set of vehicle controls from the backseat with Theron up front, playing the driver in a scene from Atomic Blonde, as he pulled off a reverse 180. It's a stunt where a car driving backward suddenly spins around so it can move in the direction it's already heading but with the front of the vehicle leading the way.

It wasn't easy, having to look over Theron's shoulder in order to perform the maneuver, but it came together, with Theron spinning the steering wheel at the right time as he counted down from “5, 4, 3, 2, 1.”

Comrie-Picard, or ACP as he’s known, said he likes to say he does “hard things with cars,” but the native Canadian who’s lived for about 15 years in Los Angeles has a more expansive message for Detroit, where he spoke at a fundraiser for the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant on Friday, Sept. 12.

Comrie-Picard whose list of accomplishments, from medaling on X Games to being part of a team that pulled off a remarkable global vehicle expedition that crossed both poles, wants his talk to distill the characteristics and the mentality of those in extreme sports and expeditioning to lessons that anyone can use in his or her everyday life.

It’s about how people in extreme sports and expeditions deal with contingencies and find a path, he said.

In movie stunts, “we plan, we plan, we plan, but then you have to have the confidence in the moment to execute. It’s a challenge to set things up as best you can and then realize that the outcome isn’t entirely certain … but press the button.”

Most people, he said, tend to overvalue the downside of risk.

Henry Ford offers an example, overcoming hardships, even bankruptcy to become successful, Comrie-Picard said, noting Ford’s confidence that he was the guy to do it.

“That’s what everybody has to do to get the best out of themselves,” he said.

Comrie-Picard, speaking by phone with the Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, described his affinity for Detroit, a place he feels a kinship with, noting the sense of entrepreneurship and the city's rejuvenation.

It's a “real story of grit and resolve and that kind of friction you get from so many people being creative, and trying really hard really creates great things."

Moving on from failure is also key, according to Comrie-Picard.

“If you’re able to claw back from some failures or some epic failures and find success on the other side you realize that no failure’s that big a deal if you have the right attitude to keep going, and that’s the story of Detroit,” he said.

When asked about his own misses, Comrie-Picard pointed to a crash at the 2008 X Games, when he flipped his rally car end-over-end trying to make a jump. The car roof was crushed, and he said his life and that of his co-driver were probably saved by the vehicle’s head and neck restraint.

It was the car he’d been using at that point to make his living, and “it was all gone, it was all horror.”

But the extreme nature of the crash landed it in a commercial, and he rebuilt with more sponsors, later returning to the X Games and medaling.

Comrie-Picard pointed to his early life growing up as an only child on a farm in Alberta, Canada, where he was “raised with benevolent neglect” and “a lot of time to myself,” describing that as formative. He learned to drive a tractor and at age 11 even rolled his dad’s pickup, which he was then told to fix.

He was good at school, getting multiple degrees and eventually went to New York and became a lawyer, which he called a terrible mistake considering his love of being out “doing stuff.” He did, however, stay engaged through car racing, and the job at least allowed him to “buy better race cars.”

A national rally championship provided the impetus to leave that job for racing and eventually TV. Stunt work on projects as varied as the Fast and the Furious and Deadpool films came later.

Last April, he added the Transglobal Car Expedition to his list of accomplishments as part of the team that completed the “first overland and maritime crossing through both the geographic North and South poles in a single, continuous journey by vehicle,” according to the expedition site.

Or as Comrie-Picard described, the “most extreme vehicle expedition we’ve ever done.”

Comrie-Picard, who's expanding his interests to improving autonomous driving efforts, said that during his life he hasn’t known what each step ahead would be, but he knew his general goal, what he was good at and what he enjoyed as well as what he could deliver.

“I just kept working towards that, and I think that’s why I get to do what I get to do,” he said. “I’m really, really, really lucky that basically I am doing professionally what I wanted to do when I was 11 years old on a dirt bike or a tractor on the farm, which is mess around with vehicles.”

Eric D. Lawrence is the senior car culture reporter at the Detroit Free Press. If you've got a tip or suggestion, contact him at elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Hollywood stunt driver brings inspiration to Ford’s historic Detroit museum

Reporting by Eric D. Lawrence, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press

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