Nitro Circus
21 Dec 2018
Credit: Indian Motorcycle
Travis Pastrana is a man that’s done everything. He’s raced bikes and cars, leapt through the air on literally anything that’s got wheels – and some things without, and even jumped out of a plane without a parachute.
He is also the ringleader of Nitro Circus Live, a ground-breaking action sports arena show which has been touring the world for almost a decade. Ahead of the show’s recent visit to Manchester, Pastrana and I caught up at his hotel where we sat down to discuss a number of elements of his varied career.
In this final part we focus on Pastrana’s attempt to recreate three of Evel Knievel’s most iconic stunts, as well as looking at the possibility of other action sports stars following his lead by making the move into motorsports.
In the summer of 2018 Nitro Circus teamed up with the History Channel for a live television extravaganza called ‘Evel Live’ which showed Pastrana attempting three of the late Evel Knievel’s most iconic stunts.
There was the 50-car jump – which was upped to 52 for Pastrana’s attempt; the 14-Greyhound bus jump – this time 16 busses; and the famed Caesar’s Palace fountain leap that left Knievel fighting for his life.
While the numbers were bigger for Pastrana compared to Knievel’s jumps in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he insists that the original idea for the three jumps wasn’t to break records, but to bring multiple generations together, bridging the gap between Knievel’s fans and those who follow modern-day action sports.
“It all got built up as breaking Evel’s records but that wasn’t really the goal at all for me,” he revealed. “Really for us it was bringing the three generations together and showing where it came from and where it went, and it was huge success for us.”
“Once a month, once every other month, most of the TV networks come to Nitro and we get all of these ideas,” Pastrana continued. “History said ‘we want to do a live stunt’, and we all sat down – this was probably August 2017 –and said that History would be such a cool thing because it’s got a bit of an older demographic. What had a lot of history? Well it would have to be Evel Knievel, so we called Caesar’s Palace and asked, ‘what do you think?’ hypothetically, and they were like ‘’no problem’, so then we called Evel’s family.”
“Nitro has gotten big enough and we’ve had just enough success that you need to be careful what you ask for because it’ll probably work,” he said. “So we made some calls and it didn’t take much time to line up.”
“I’d just landed my double-backflip 360 and I’m like ‘I’m done, I’m not doing any more stupid stunts’, and they all kind of looked at me and they said this is pretty cool but we could bring in your Dad’s generation and show them that the stunt man is not dead by showing him where it’s gone with action sports and we can show the new generation where it started with Evel Knievel and have a chance to do something on live television, have a chance to do something that’s bigger than motorsport if you will – and I was like alright, count me in. This is going to be the coolest thing ever.”
Pastrana dressed the part for Evel Live – Credit: Indian Motorcycle
As well as the record-breaking nature of the three attempts, the inherent danger of the event was also talked about a lot in the build-up to it. To keep things authentic, Pastrana used an Indian Scout FTR750 – a bike similar to the relatively inappropriate bikes used by Knievel in his heyday – rather than his usual dirt bike which would have made the jumps much easier because of its greater suspension travel.
Surgery prior to the jumps made testing the unusual bike difficult for Pastrana, who only had a few runs on mocked-up jumps before heading to Vegas.
“It would have been way easier to jump a car through those jumps for instance, but we’ve proved that we can jump cars over those distances,” Pastrana said.
“I couldn’t do much of the testing because I’d just had surgery on my wrist and was not in a great position for that,” he added. “But we geared my dirt bike up for that and I could do every jump but the Caesar’s fountain jump on a modern bike with modern suspension, so it made it a lot easier.”
As well as working on the vehicle, modern technology allowed Pastrana and his team to prepare ramps much more suitable than those used back in the day; but despite the bike and the ramps being finely-tuned, nothing could compensate for the period-costume that he opted to wear.
“For the ramps we have technology now so instead of just a wedge ramp we did have a little bit of transition at the bottom,” he said,” but still going and using high-heeled dress boots, no pads, a crappy helmet, a cape … we tried to do it as authentic as possible and it still had a big element of if you mess up its going to be really bad, but at the end of the day that’s our jobs now, to be right on the money.”
More Nitro Circus Live athletes could follow Pastrana into four-wheeled motorsport – Credit Nitro Circus
As promised, Evel Live bridged the gap between one of the world’s original daredevils and the modern-day equivalent of his activities. But what about a new breed following in Pastrana’s footsteps?
After claiming every honour there is in the world of freestyle motocross – and breaking every bone in his body along the way – Pastrana has gone on to become a successful motorsport competitor and he thinks more daredevils have the potential to join him.
“At the moment Bilko [Blake Williams] is the only one that I think could be competitive but there are a lot of guys putting in their own time and their own money into cars,” said Pastrana. “Look at a guy like James Foster, he’s won the last two X Games gold medals and all he talks about is cars. He’s more into building cars and that kind of stuff and I’m just like ‘stop building drag cars and get out there and actually do something’.”
“Cars don’t really fit the action sports mould, but what’s interesting is that our audience is getting older – or broader I guess – and when people turn 16, 17, 18, their focus goes from the guys that ride the scooters, BMX, and skateboards are now rallycross fans,” he said. “But as our market gets older and starts to drive, we can really go with a big platform behind us, whereas a couple of years ago most of our audience wasn’t interested.”
As for more record-breaking jumps, Pastrana hasn’t got anything wild in the pipeline, insisting that he wants to focus more on his family life and developing the Nitro Rallycross concept, but he isn’t ruling anything out.
“For me it’s more about waking up with that passion and for me and definitely my kids I’ve been gone a lot recently. My wife is on tour, the tours are actually where we get to come together as a family but now that the kids are starting school and all, I want them to be home more, but that competitive nature will never go away.”
