As children, many of us played with Hot Wheels cars, crashing them into each other, pushing them over homemade ramps, and of course, launching them through little plastic corkscrew tracks. But Hot Wheels aren’t just children’s play things. Some are actually scale models of real cars that Team Hot Wheels has had their hands on, putting them through crazy stunts before making them into toys.
For their latest project, Team Hot Wheels got their hands on a crazy sandrail-esque vehicle and used it not only to stunt at the company’s top secret test facility (its disguised to look like an airport), but attempt the longest corkscrew jump with. Check it out in the video above.
When you think of Hot Wheels, chances are that miniature diecasts are the first things to come to mind. But as it turns out, Hot Wheels isn’t just about children’s toys- they’re also about grown up toys. For example, just last year, Hot Wheels teamed up with GM to create a life-size Hot Wheels Camaro that caused a roar of approval at the Specialty Equipment Market Association Show in Las Vegas.
Similarly, Team Hot Wheels, a special sector of the toy car company, has been known to take production and specialty cars, do crazy stunts with them, and then turn them into some of the company’s many famous mini models.
Just a couple months ago, Team Hot Wheels sent two teams to the X Games in Los Angeles for the Double Loop Dare, where they piloted cars through a giant model of the Hot Wheels loop track. Now, one of those teams, the Hot Wheels Team Green, has completed yet another amazing stunt with driver piloting the new Hot Wheels test car through a massive corkscrew jump. With world records to be had, Tracy hit the ramp expertly, launching the car a massive 92 feet to set the new world record for a corkscrew jump.
As amazing as the footage is, DRIVE host Alex Roy was able to experience the jump firsthand, being invited to the test facility the day of the jump.While Roy wasn’t able to get too many secrets out of the Team Hot Wheels engineers, he did get a few interesting tidbits about how the ramp works to put the car into a spiral and just how big of a difference speed makes in the overall landing position.
Check out Roy’s account of the facility and jump in the video below.