The past couple of years have seen the rise of a strange branch of motorsports, an uneasy alliance between the ‘Xtreme’ generation of sports sponsors and the motoring world that’s resulted in a new event in the X-Games and chaps like Ken Block (I still have a Blockhead cap somewhere, cheers Dennis!) earning the respect of a new audience world-wide for his amazing prowess on four wheels.
More recently, we’ve had a superstar of the FMX world – Travis Pastrana – garnering a stupid amount of publicity and Generation-X mindshare by jumping his Subaru Impreza a world-record distance over a river. This is where I have to hold my hand up and say enough is enough; The hype and publicity surrounding this sort of thing completely outweighs the act itself – it’s basic and fairly well controlled mathematics and to me it cheapens the stuff that Travis does outside of this circus. I’m not saying that jumping cars isn’t pretty fucking ace, it’s just the promotion that’s beyond ridiculous.
Anyway, If you want to see some real skill on four wheels, check out the two videos below. Not only are these incredible in terms of the talent required to drive a car in such a fashion, the risks involved are real and up there with what it takes to flip a set of doubles on a motorcross bike: