How far can a British sports car jump in real life?

if this had been hollywood he would have made it but this was not hollywood it was in north georgia in 1990 and he did not make it in this fabulous modern age we live in everybody from age 5 to 75 has got a camera phone on the ready to record every amazing thing that happened our streets and our walls and our ceilings are covering security cameras our race cars and helmets have dash cams and gopros we have instagram and facebook and youtube and these great venues that inspire people to share and for fans of the automobile for motorheads gearheads you know that's been wonderful for us we've gotten to see nearly every amazing thing that's happened on four wheels or two in the last 30 years what i think about though were all the times in that 75 or 80 years before there was a camera everywhere all the amazing things that happened before there was anybody there to take a picture you know you hear people say oh no photo it didn't happen well a lot of stuff happened before cameras a lot of my stories happen before cameras and you know the only way anybody ever knew about it there was somebody there to tell the story and before he died burt reynolds said in the end all you got are your stories and this is one of those stories it was something that happened i saw it it's absolutely amazing and nobody will probably believe it but i'm gonna tell you anyway as many great stories do it happened in high school i am out with a bunch of friends of mine we you know lived in this little country town we didn't have a mall or a theater a club we just had back roads and lakes and there was this one lake way up in the mountains and we'd all go hang out and swim and do whatever and this was a weekend afternoon and summertime i think it might even be an earth day or something like that and we're all just out floating around on inner tubes and having a good time and this afternoon somebody's playing music we're just having a good time it's like you know any teenage movie there was a guy that i went to school with now i was still in high school he'd already graduated he was a couple years older nice and his name was billy and billy's dad owned a junkyard and you know in a little country town we all most of us drove farm trucks or some old american car might be some little economy car from japan or somewhere but you know nobody had anything from europe nobody had a true you know foreign classic car i didn't see very interesting cars like that a lot except billy and billy's dad i guess being a we call him a flipper nowadays but back then we called him a horse trader you know he was just a guy that was always trading something for something interesting and he'd fix it up probably do a motor swap whatever and so billy and his brother both just always had some really interesting car that you just didn't see very often in this particular day billy is in an old very late 50s early 60s triumph tr-3 they're beautiful little cars they got these really neat little cutouts door cuts down you sit right back a long hood classic british sports car the car however did not fit billy billy was one of these salt of the earth kind of guys he kind of looked like hank williams jr you know with the glasses with the kind of amber fade tent he was a you know just a deer hunting country guy and for him to be in this little british sports car not only did he not fit this car culturally he also did not fit this car physically billy was a big guy not just in his height but in his circumference the little door cutouts you know that car the doors kind of come down really low and when he drove that car he literally kind of had to hang out of the side of that car he his head sort of stuck up over the windshield he looked like a mario kart character in a way and and i don't call out billy's size to put him down in any way it's actually gonna save his life in about two minutes into this story so it's afternoon we're all hanging out having a good time and billy being a simple man he was kind of a man of few words he just gets up one point and says going home and he gets in his car and as all country boys do he slung some gravel and kicked it out and peeling off up the road now the road up to this lake was a really precarious road it was just a steep kind of mountain canyon they just sort of carved the road out of it it was you know just rocks on this side drop off on this side and if you're going up or down at the ford perspective it's almost like a roller coaster it was just a series of hills and you could just see all the the crest of these hills and if you're out there with your friends having a good time you'd get a good head of speed up go fast and you kind of get that little bit of weightlessness going over you know kind of roller coaster except in two different spots as you crested the hill erosion tectonic plates whatever the road just made a very sharp 90 degree turn went in about 100 yards made a hairpin turn came back out to the face of this canyon and continued on and if you knew the road well you knew where those places were or you were counting or whatever but needless to say billy was a great driver but maybe math was not his strong point all we knew is that we're still splash around at the lake and we look up the road and we see a figure on foot walking back billy struck a very distinctive profile we knew it was billy and uh he comes back and of course we ask you know what happened he said my car ran off the road i need a rope and you know a bunch of eager high school kids uh you know we all had trucks with chains and tractor parts what not in it uh there was a georgia power plant near us and a lot of the kids whose dads worked there always had these big hollow well he just called it a georgia power rope you know just this big old yellow 100 foot whatever big strong rope somebody always had one go get a georgia power rope well somebody had a georgia power rope a bunch i was hop in the back of a couple of trucks you know and again we're like the you know we're like the kids in red dawn you know we're just these little country kids we all pound the back of a truck we go tearing off up the hill you know and i i knew billy we weren't i wasn't really tight with him i'm just one of the younger kids that got lucky to get in the back of the truck even some of the older guys are in the front they're really running the show we're just kind of along for the ride because we want to see so we get up on the road and you know we don't see billy's car anywhere and and we get to the first of those little cut-ins and it's like it's down there and to set the scene we are on this gravel road we've got a six or seven story drop off to the right we've got a really steep cut up to the left road's about two lanes wide and the road just makes a sharp 90 degree turn back into this round this cliff you know as i described you know the road was this kind of series of roller coaster hills you know the main road does line up on the other side and the road we're sitting on is probably 10 feet higher than where the road continues on the other side the gap is maybe 60 80 feet probably it's about eight or nine stories down you know to our little forensic minds we're you know looking at all the skid marks and whatnot you know billy and his friends are getting the ropes out and all that what we could devise was that you know billy was flying down this road topped this hill realized he'd come up to one of the cuts where the road did not go straight we could see the skid marks in the gravel where he had apparently put the brakes on for a second but realized he wasn't going to make it and being a good country boy what did billy do he put it to the floor if this had been hollywood he would have made it but this was not hollywood it was in north georgia in 1990 and he did not make it but this is where the story becomes truly miraculous billy hits the gas as his car left the road the significant mass of billy sitting in this very very lightweight car and now triumph tr3 you practically sit between the back wheels the engines practically in the middle of the car and of course billy being in the very back this car is very tail heavy he had his foot on the gas he had some acceleration which kind of creates a little bit of lift what happened was as he went off of that cliff trying to make it as he left the ground his weight caused that car to go tail down and he landed wheels down on the opposite cliff face now you know in the south we have this brush plants called sumac just these itchy woody kind of vines they grow on cliff sides and sides of the road and there was a good six or eight feet of this brush you know growing on this cliff face over here so when billy left the road he just tilted just right and just landed and that seven or eight feet of brush just sort of cushioned the car and he stuck it on the wall about 10 feet shy no he was probably going 40 miles an hour this had been a pretty violent hit and the car was relatively okay i mean it was scratched up i i'm sure some things were bent underneath but he made the gap stuck it on the wall climbed up and just walked back to the lake and being a man a few words my car ran off the road so they threw down a georgia power rope hooked into a truck pulled him out the car was apparently drivable he got in the car and said thank you cranked it up peeled out some gravel it took off there were no photos i don't think any of us even knew anybody that owned the camera back then but i didn't see it happen but i saw the aftermath i saw how he got there that was the most amazing thing i ever saw that i wish i had a picture of [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 106,549

Keywords: Christopher Michaels, Triumph, TR3, VINwiki, Car Stories, Storyteller, country, growing up, high school, jump, crazy, storytelling, Burt Reynolds, Hank Williams Jr, close call

Id: vcmnRNc8q8Y

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020