Stunts

The last time I did a donut in a car was sometime back in high school, in my friend’s burnt orange Buick sedan. We ended up in a snow-covered parking lot, and my buddy Tom decided to pull off a few spins.

If you live in Cleveland, Ohio, you have a chance to see some of the next Fast & Furious movie being filmed. Recently, Fast 8 tossed a car out of the Halle parking garage onto other cars on the road during second-unit filming.

Take an awesome ride through a virtual reality race course with stunt driver Ben Collins (formerly Top Gear’s The Stig), and Formula Drift pro Matt Powers, in this cool stunt they performed for Castrol EDGE. For the Castrol EDGE Titanium Strong Virtual Racers video, each of the drivers donned an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset as they raced through two separate courses.

Aston Martin and 007 have a long history together, though typically the Astons in Bond films are production cars. For the new film Spectre, Aston Martin built a handful of special DB10 cars, some of which are equipped with roll cages for stunt work.

So here’s a question: Can a remote controlled car outgun a real Lamborghini Gallardo? While the Lambo packs a 550 horsepower 10-cylinder engine that can launch the car from 0-to-60 in just 3.4 seconds, the toy car weighs next to nothing and has a brushless electric motor that offers instantaneous torque.

You hear a lot about big-time stars doing their own stunts in the movies, but that always sounds like a lot of studio hype to me. Well, in a just released video promoting Tom Cruise’s starring role in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, we see the mega star behind the wheel of a BMW M3 doing some pretty badass maneuvers.

At this past weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, a world record was set that wasn’t all that fast, but it was mighty damn skillful. Renowned stunt car driver Terry Grant got into the Guinness Book of World Records when he got behind the wheel of the GT-R powered Nissan Juke Nismo RS and drove it up the very challenging 1.16-mile course, averaging a very respectable 30 mph along the way – on two wheels.

It takes a certain amount of bravery or a certain lack of preservative instincts to simply make the decision to ride a motorcycle. It takes the same traits on an entirely distant order of magnitude to attempt high-flying, never before done stunts on one.

I crashed during my driver’s license exam. Whoops. There was a narrow bridge that was covered in snow on an Indiana back road, and I tried to sneak by the car coming in the opposite direction.

Big Rigs drive the highways around our nation and the world each day carrying all sorts of cargo. These massive trucks can survive head on collisions that crumple other vehicles into balls of useless metal. These trucks are so big and heavy I bet you have never thought of anyone jumping one of them into the air on purpose.

Lots of people don’t ride motorcycles because the risk of a 70 mph impact is a little too much to bear. Virtually nobody tries to jump over motorcycles at 70 mph, because that’s bloody lunacy. Not only does the driver take a large risk of horrifying dismemberment, but the jumper takes that risk even more.

We all love Ken Block’s amazing Gymkhana drift racing videos and, while there have been many imitators who’ve driven vehicles from Freightliner semis to tiny RC cars, perhaps no one does it better than Ken Box, who does it in a cardboard box.

It takes a daredevil attitude to jump a car off of a ramp in the first place. But to take an 18-wheeler off a ramp must really take balls of steel. Add to the challenge the fact that a Formula One race car is zipping beneath your hurtling semi as you go flying through the air, and it seems like downright insanity.

Stunt driver Mauro Calo has done stunt work for numerous car commercials and programs such as the UK edition of Top Gear and Autocar magazine. Mauro has just released a show reel which bears witness to some of his driving footage, and it’s filled with spectacular scenes of powerslides, jumps and drifts.

I’m not going to say that I condone the what they’re doing in this stunt video, but it’s still pretty amazing to see a guy on skates pulled behind a car at 125mph. Skater Dirk Auer grabbed onto the back of an amped-up 593 horsepower Dodge Challeger SRT8, and let it pull him down the road at a speed which is daunting enough inside of a car, let alone outside, and on rollerskates.