The iconic Indianapolis 500 will celebrate its 100th anniversary this Memorial Day weekend, but a crew of stunt drivers, engineers and construction experts is banking on a side spectacle that’ll amaze fans as much as the race itself.
A dedicated crew of dozens has secretly spent the past few weeks in Southern California building, testing and tweaking a custom-built truck as well as a life-sized version of the Hot Wheels toy track set so many of us enjoyed of us as kids. And if all goes according to spec, the Pro2-style truck (driven by a masked stunt driver) will jump across a gap more than 302 feet in length, breaking the world record for largest leap by a four-wheeled vehicle.
“This has been my life for the last 22 years, jumping people off of stuff,” said Jack Murphy, whose eponymous production company helped spearhead the number-crunching that got the project firmly off the ground earlier this year. “What really excited me is that no one else but Hot Wheels can own a stunt like this.”
Indeed, the entire 100-foot-tall setup will be modeled to resemble a child’s bedroom, where one end of the toy track is hung up on a gigantic bedroom door, with the rest of the track extending out toward the ground. Normally, these kits would have some sort of loop that the toy car would drive through, but that’s been replaced here with a wide gap that will be the scene for the record-breaking jump attempt.
The custom-built, Pro2-style truck weighs 3,500 pounds and sports an 850-horsepower engine under the hood.
“Obviously, we can’t predict what the conditions are going to be, but we’ve accounted for every variable,” said Jesse Olson, who has worked on coordinating previous world-record jumps and was instrumental in making sure the jump calculations, angles and speed were precise. “We had a weather station on site, recording data during every jump, and we’ve seen everything from a 10-mph tail wind to a 25-mph head wind, so we’re aware of how even the smallest change in conditions will affect the truck.”
