Yahoo Autos Let Travis Pastrana Tell You What It's Like to Jump a Car
Travis Pastrana has spent a preposterous amount of time in midair: as a kid, jumping a BMX bike into a sand pile; as a teen Moto X Freestyle phenom, nailing high-flying Superman seat grabs; as an adult, sending a Subaru rally car 269 feet across Long Beach Harbor. He’s tossed himself out of a Cessna without a parachute. He landed a groundbreaking double backflip at the X Games in 2006 and stuck a barge-to-barge backflip on London’s River Thames with such ease that you’d swear it was a matter of evolutionary adaptation instead of mere skill.
This story originally appeared in Volume 21 of Road & Track.
Exactly how Pastrana achieves human flight—minus wings—sits at the nexus of applied physics and the mystery of human performance. For those of us who seldom slip the surly bonds of earth, except to fly coach, hearing Pastrana relate the experience is kind of unsatisfying, like a giraffe explaining what it feels like to eat those leaves way up there.
“It’s like a golfer hitting a ball, except we’re the ball,” he says. “You know how far each iron and each club is going to get you and how much power you’re going to need.”
Having long since passed the axiomatic 10,000 hours to master a skill, Pastrana brings a unique suitability for flight, combining raw instinct and a deep understanding of his environment. “Travis has the knowledge and air awareness,” says Nate Wessel, who’s built many of the ramps for Pastrana’s antics. “Travis can get on something that’s never been touched before and know the speed, and he can take a lot of the risk factor out of it.”
“I don’t think there’s anybody else I’ve ever worked with who has that talent,” says Dave Mateus, who started collaborating with Pastrana as a marketing manager at Red Bull more than a decade ago. He’s kept detailed accounts in a notebook documenting every jump he and Travis have done together, and he refers to it when they’re planning new attempts. “We’ve already done it in practice, so if it’s all the same based on what we’ve surveyed, muscle memory takes over, and he nails it,” Mateus says.
To Pastrana, transparent repetition may have endowed him with a sixth sense, but to a physicist, the science of jumping stuff begins with math. “At the very basic level, it would be just your standard projectile-motion problem,” says Rhett Allain, PhD, an associate professor of physics and a science writer. “If you know the initial velocity [of an object] and the initial angle, you can find out where it’s going to go. With car jumping, I know the angle of the ramp. I know how fast it’s going. I can calculate its position every second after that and find out where it’s going to be and where it’s going to land. That’s the first-level approximation.”
Air resistance also plays a role, and a vehicle’s speed contributes to its effects. “We found that 70 miles per hour is your number,” Pastrana says, referring to the speed at which, according to his experience, air resistance has a negligible effect on a jump. “If you’re hitting a 200-foot jump [at that speed], and you do it in a golf cart, and on a dirt bike, and in a school bus, and in a semi truck—they all fly the exact same distance.”
That sounds reasonable to Allain, with a caveat: The shape of an object matters. “If you ignore air resistance, these things all move the same way,” he says. “The gravitational force depends on mass, and the change in velocity also depends on that same mass, so the mass cancels. That’s why if you drop a bowling ball and a golf ball, they have the same acceleration. It gets really complicated when you add in the air resistance. If you have a golf cart going 200 miles per hour, it’s not going to jump as fast as a different car going 200 miles per hour because the effect of air on those two will be different.”
Still, getting to the heart of Pastrana’s long career in flight—he turned 40 last year—and his instinctual relationship with physics means going back to where he started. His sprawling home in Davidsonville, Maryland, is just a few minutes from where he was born. It’s a playground of huge ramps and winding trails he calls Pastranaland. His property was also featured in his first starring role in the long-standing Gymkhana video series in 2020, in which he launched an 862-hp Subaru WRX STI nicknamed “the Airslayer” into the air at 150 mph down a tree-lined, two-lane country road.
Pastrana lives in the air above the property as much as he does on the ground.
“Among the trees out there at Travis’s house,” Mateus says, “is the history of freestyle motocross and flight. If those ramps could talk, they’d tell a story of Travis in the air. Along those trails, there’s all this history of ramp evolution, jump evolution, and creativity.”
“We base our motions off our world,” Allain says. “We started off as toddlers, we fell down, and we learned this does this and this, that does that. I don’t know the physics of falling over. I just know that if I don’t put my foot here, I’m gonna fall. [Pastrana] has been on a motorcycle for a long time. So you kind of build up that instinct.”
Charlie Duke on driving where there is no air.
You know what’s scarier than an airless hard vacuum, heat that can boil the blood in your veins, and meteorites smaller than grains of sand but flying faster than bullets?
Driving around in it a quarter-million miles from the nearest service station, on a lifeless hellscape of boulders and craters, in an essentially untested 1969 General Motors product.
Charlie Duke did that. He didn’t spook easily, having endured, just a few days before, the senses-blotting thunder of a launch into space at the tip of the biggest, most powerful rocket the world had yet seen. He found it fun. So much so that his radio transmissions back to Houston seem lifted from The Dukes of Hazzard. “Man, are we accelerating!” he hollered as he careened down the side of one steep crater. “Super!”
Duke, 88, is one of six humans to have explored the moon on wheels. His ride was a tiny open go-kart, with beach chairs for seats, one lonely horsepower, and a top speed barely into double digits. Despite its cost—$107 million in today’s money—it wasn’t built to last. After three days of use, Duke and his wingman, Apollo 16 commander John Young, parked it for good.
Still, NASA got its money’s worth. With a production run of three, the lunar roving vehicles, or LRVs, jounced across a total of 56 miles of the moon’s broken surface, transforming Apollo landings from modest walkabouts to bona fide scientific expeditions.
Duke rode shotgun in the second rover to reach the moon in April 1972. The first challenge was simply taking his seat: “Our spacesuits didn’t bend easily,” he recalls. “So you had to throw yourself back into the seat, get the seatbelt wrapped around you, then use the belt to cinch yourself into a sitting position.”
Then he had to hang on tight because the moon’s one-sixth gravity made for “a really sporty ride.” At just 77 pounds on the moon’s surface, the LRV practically floated. Combined with its lively suspension and 7.5-foot wheelbase, “it was squirrelly, like you were driving on ice,” Duke says. “It was bouncy. We’d hit a rock, and a front wheel would come up, and it would hang there for a moment off the ground, and it could be hard to control the rover as that wheel came down.”
The effect was a bit like riding a bucking bronco in slow motion. “It never felt like it was thudding onto the surface, like it does with a jump on a bike or a car on the earth—there was never a hard hit,” he says. “The bounciness was very soft, but it was pretty constant.”
Young did the driving using a joystick between the seats. “If anything, the steering was maybe a little too sensitive,” says Duke, who navigated, shot photos, and provided Mission Control with a running description of the surroundings. “We’d be underway, and I’d turn in my seat to get a side picture, and I’d bump John’s elbow, and that would... change his steering, and then he’d start fishtailing as he tried to get it back under control.
“I’m glad I had my seatbelt on,” Duke continues. “One time, we did a one-eighty. John went over a rise, and there was a crater in front of us, and he turned hard, and we slid sideways into the crater.” And while climbing a steep mountainside, the rover was pitched so nose-high that “it felt like we were going to fall out the back of our seats.”
The lurching, pogoing ride kept his mind off an ever-present hazard: the moon’s absence of air. Duke’s survival depended on the pumps, batteries, and tanks in his backpack, a vital defense against the deadly vacuum of space. “The idea was to drive to the farthest point of your traverse at the start of the day and do the work you had to do there first,” Duke describes. “The later stops would be getting you closer to the lunar module. Then, if the car broke down, you had enough oxygen... to get you back. At least, that was the plan.” Luckily, the astronauts never had to put that plan to the test.
Airlessness had less obvious effects. With nothing to diffuse the sun’s rays, the lunar surface was a quilt of blinding light and deep shadow. Temperatures in the former reached 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Keeping the LRV’s delicate electronics cool was a major preoccupation. Worse, Young broke a rear fender, and the exposed wire-mesh tire heaved up great roostertails of moondust onto the machine and its passengers. A heat-absorbing veneer formed, threatening to foul up machinery and spacesuits. Duke spent a lot of time cleaning.
Lack of an atmosphere also scrambled the explorers’ sense of scale. “You’re just seeing rocks, and a big one far away looks very similar to a small one closer in,” Duke says. Fixing their position proved surprisingly difficult, and they were repeatedly ambushed by seemingly faraway craters and boulders—one reason why Young rarely pushed their rover to more than 6 mph.
Not that Duke didn’t want him to. Minutes into the first of their three drives, he was urging Young to let it rip. “Hey man, we could just go, babe,” he remembers telling him. “I feel real faith in his thing. Open her up a little bit.”
Ron Capps on pulling a drag chute.
If things go well, you’ll have bruises around your eye sockets from the force of your blood bursting your veins. If things go poorly, you’ll have bruises everywhere from taking a 300-mph ride into the net at the end of the sand trap. “I’ve only been in one a couple of times,” three-time Funny Car champion Ron Capps says casually, as if it were no big deal to slide upside down in the gravel at speeds faster than a bullet train. He pauses for a second, remembering the feeling of winning the round and then realizing the parachutes hadn’t deployed. “It was not good.”
Capps pilots the NAPA Auto Parts Toyota Supra Funny Car in NHRA drag racing. Nitro Funny Cars are some of the quickest-accelerating cars on earth, hitting speeds of more than 330 mph in less than four seconds. They achieve this in only 1000 feet, leaving around another 1640 feet or so to slow down. Given that a Porsche GT3 RS takes about 514 feet to whoa from 150 mph, you can imagine the force required to stop something going twice that speed. To manage it, Funny Cars and their stretched sisters, Top Fuel dragsters, use parachutes along with carbon-fiber disc brakes. But there’s more to the halt than simply pulling a rip cord.
The use of parachutes in straight-line racing can be traced to the late Fifties. Racer Jim Deist, whose day job was making military parachutes for Irving Air Chute in Glendale, California, is generally credited with the first use of a chute in drag racing, although racers from both drag-strip and dry-lake speed runs were experimenting with the idea at that time. Deist and dragster driver Abe Carson began testing a parachute specifically for automotive use in 1956. By 1959, chutes were required safety equipment for any racer hitting more than 150 mph at the end of a quarter-mile run.
The first chutes were massive, blooming in a single gorgeous cloud around the back of the car. They were the delight of photographers but hit the drivers with punishing negative g-forces. So violent was the deceleration that by the Nineties, when the cars were first breaking the 300-mph mark, the force of stopping was nearly ripping drivers’ eyes from their heads. The king of the sport, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, was forced to retire in 1992 after the retina of his left eye detached in testing. Eight years later, five-time Top Fuel champion Joe Amato stepped away from the cockpit because of retina tears in both eyes. Today the nitro classes use a two-parachute system that hits with “only” 7 g’s.
So what do 7 g’s feel like in the negative? “I’m always trying to think of how to explain it,” Capps says. “You’re picking up a lot of speed the second half of the track. The acceleration gets unbelievable. It’s like you’re in a Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica movie, like hyperspace. And you’re accelerating so hard and so fast that you have to focus your eyes exactly where you need to time [the deployment of] your parachutes. You have to have internal timing in your brain based off how fast the run is going, because you want to make sure you’ve got the parachutes out before you get to the finish line. If you hit that cable at the finish line, you’ll be way past when the chutes actually deploy.
“First of all, you’re glad when [the chutes] hit. I feel almost affectionate toward them. You can sort of tell the speed of the run by how hard they pop and how hard you’re trying to stay in your seat because the force basically wants to throw you out the front of the car, but you’re strapped in with 13 different straps. Thankfully, years ago, we started going to head-and-neck devices. Because prior to that, the hit would just tear your neck muscles. There were mornings I would wake up and I couldn’t lift my head up off the pillow. You can feel that pop against the tethers of the head-and-neck device. It’s violent, and if they happen to hit on both parachutes simultaneously, it really hurts. But it also slows you down very quickly. You don’t even have to touch the brake.”
Capps has been driving cars that require a chute for more than 30 years and has seen the evolution from one chute to two, from delicate nylon to abrasion-resistant Kevlar, and from a manual release lever that had to be pushed or pulled to a button typically mounted on the steering wheel that uses an air solenoid to deploy the laundry. The deployment can be done automatically, based on a wheel counter that measures rotations, but Capps still likes to choose when to drop his chutes.
“I still want to feel that I’m in control,” he says. But he admits the emergency deployment has saved him a few times. “A Funny Car, you are constantly steering it. It’s out of control from the start, and you are just trying to get it to the finish. So if a cylinder goes out, that will move you over six feet in a split second, and you’re turning the wheel to get to the finish line straight, and then you’ve somehow got to get your thumb over to the button. So then I’m glad to have help. There’s no worse feeling than when the chutes don’t come out. I have nightmares about it.”
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