Matt Jones has made a career out of doing the unthinkable, but his latest project pushes right past bravado and into physics class. At a closed Scania test track in Sweden, the British freerider set out to jump his bike through two moving trucks. A gap that would exist for less than one second.
“I’m about to jump my bike through these two moving trucks through a gap that will only exist for less than a second,” he says at the start of the video, equal parts calm and horrified.
Before going anywhere near moving steel, Jones tested the stunt with both trucks parked. The headroom was “disgusting,” he said. “How are you not going to hit your head?”
To get up to speed, he used an Audi RSQ8 with 600 horsepower and ceramic brakes. “That feels like a slingshot.”
Testing the impossible
When the trucks start moving, the problem becomes brutal. The trucks move 11 metres a second combined. “So this gap is closing 11 metres a second,” he says. “You’ve got about half a second left here.”
Everything can go wrong: “Too high, too low, too right, too fast, too slow. Doom.”
Before attempting two trucks, Jones had to clear one. The window was 1.6 seconds with no bailout plan. Scania used two driverless trucks programmed to cross with perfect timing. “Zero chance of human error,” he says.
On the first run he backs off. On the second, he makes it. “I couldn’t breathe,” he admits. “That’s one truck down. Let’s go for two.”
Red lights, running out of daylight
To remove guesswork, engineers programmed a red-light/green-light system that would tell Jones if the timing was safe. The trucks, the Audi and Jones’ speed were tracked by GPS. If the light turned green, he had to go.
But the light stayed red. Over and over.
“We’re really fighting the sun now,” he says as darkness creeps in. On one run he misses green by 0.02 seconds. “The margin between a red light and a green light is so tight,” he says. “A green still means I just skim the cab and almost get cleaned out by the back of the next trailer.”
He calls it mentally exhausting. “It’s hard to be so revved up for something and then have to abort it based on someone else.”
The green light
Morning brings another chance.
“It’s going to be the easiest, scariest thing I’ve ever done,” he says, heading to the start ramp. “See you on the other side.”
The light finally turns green.
Jones commits.
He hits the takeoff, threads the shrinking gap…
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