Big kids Hotwheels loop-the-loop

November 28, 2009 3:09 AM

Fifth Gear Loop the Loop. (SLYT, in the interest of science) prev 5th gear
posted by allkindsoftime (39 comments total)

The speed necessary is not at all what I anticipated......
posted by HuronBob at 3:16 AM on November 28, 2009

fifth gear < top gear

still, the pay-off is surprisingly awesome
posted by mhjb at 3:28 AM on November 28, 2009

I think the logical conclusion of all of this this is Tiff Needel(sp?) and Jeremy Clarkson in the Thunderdome.
posted by PenDevil at 3:39 AM on November 28, 2009

That made me smile more than I anticipated. Thanks. :)
posted by Liver at 3:47 AM on November 28, 2009

How long has Fifth Gear had that copycat studio set for?
posted by cillit bang at 4:07 AM on November 28, 2009

Physics. It works, bitches.
posted by cgomez at 4:18 AM on November 28, 2009 [12 favorites]

THAT WAS AWESOME! I can die happy knowing that it's possible to loop-the-loop.
posted by TooFewShoes at 4:25 AM on November 28, 2009

Can't view it at work but can anyone tell me if they do more than simply loop the loop? Do they drive for a certain period of time upside down for example?
posted by longbaugh at 4:45 AM on November 28, 2009

That was pretty awesome.
posted by delmoi at 5:10 AM on November 28, 2009

Top that Top Gear! :) By which of course I mean please, both shows engage in an escalating series of stunts exposing yourselves to ever increase levels of danger for my arm chair amusement.
posted by adamt at 5:19 AM on November 28, 2009 [1 favorite]

Ok that was pretty neat, but next I want to see him do it on a Möbius strip.
posted by vronsky at 5:30 AM on November 28, 2009 [2 favorites]

The Jackass Crew did it with Gravity fifth gear fails to impress. Jezzer, Capt. slow and Hampster for the win (along with Party Boy, Knoxville and the amazing disappointment.
posted by NiteMayr at 5:32 AM on November 28, 2009

Yeah, but could they do it in a Unimog off a Danish Modern coffee table? That was me, at age six.
posted by scruss at 5:43 AM on November 28, 2009

Anyone who thinks the Jackass loop is better than the car loop is insane.
posted by unSane at 6:01 AM on November 28, 2009

Nobody drives like Tiff Needel. I love how he presents the show at 129054mph just casually chatting. But I love both shows though.
posted by Submiqent at 7:30 AM on November 28, 2009

That seemed like a pretty slap dash affair, what with the car scraping against the ground and all.
posted by mecran01 at 8:20 AM on November 28, 2009

"That seemed like a pretty slap dash affair, what with the car scraping against the ground and all."

Do you think a stiffer suspension might have prevented that? I don't think standard Toyota struts are designed to withstand 6g.
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 8:47 AM on November 28, 2009

Did anyone else read that initially as "Fifth Column Loop the Loop"?

V FTW...
posted by limeonaire at 8:52 AM on November 28, 2009

What? I was hoping to see this done on a Big Wheel.
posted by filmgeek at 9:04 AM on November 28, 2009

THAT WAS SO EXCITING! No seriously, that video was way more exciting to watch than I expected it would be.
posted by iamkimiam at 9:29 AM on November 28, 2009

That seemed like a pretty slap dash affair...

That's why it was exciting. If the construction and presentation had been more slick, the end result would have looked like CGI. Ho hum. As it was (ordinary car, carnival-style track), you half expected him to go flying off the rails.
posted by SPrintF at 9:39 AM on November 28, 2009

Wait, that's not a full sized car....

Now Top Gear is going to try it with The Stig in a Veyron.
posted by eriko at 10:00 AM on November 28, 2009 [2 favorites]

Next: Ghostriding the loop
posted by Eideteker at 10:10 AM on November 28, 2009 [3 favorites]

Ya know, if a rollercoaster can go through a loop, I don't see how a car couldn't. Meh.
posted by SansPoint at 12:09 PM on November 28, 2009

SansPoint: rollercoaster carss have wheels underneath the tracks that keep them from lifting up. This is the case even on wooden coasters.
posted by zsazsa at 1:29 PM on November 28, 2009

I used to love the little plastic tracks with the loops. My old set is still probably somewhere at my parents' house - it was two tracks running side-by-side, from a start gate, through a loop, and then through finish barriers that dropped a little flag down to show which car had passed the barrier first. (Or it would just drop down on a random side if they'd gone through almost together. Either way, it was a great way of avoiding arguments between 7-year-olds as to whose car was faster.)

The tracks were designed to be propped up on the back of a chair or something, so there wouldn't be that much speed. I found this to be less than exciting.

So, after a couple of years of occasionally playing with this set as designed, it suddenly struck me that I had enough connectors to reconfigure the track slightly, so that instead of two tracks, each with one loop, it could actually be one very long track, either with two loops, one very fast loop, or no loops and a big ramp at the end. And if it was that long, there was no chair in the world that would be tall enough to get up to full speed. But the stairs...they were exactly the right length.

And so it was that my parents had a very confusing afternoon of hearing muffled whizzing noises and loud bangs coming from the hallway, as I repeatedly sent little Matchbox cars down the stairs at impossibly high speeds, to go up the ramp, fly through the air with the force of a little die-cast bullet, and thump into the front door.

There isn't much point to this story except to say that I am extremely happy that Fifth Gear have confirmed this can now be done with full-size cars. I suspect my parents would have something to say if I sent a Toyota Aygo through their front door, though.
posted by ZsigE at 1:48 PM on November 28, 2009 [5 favorites]

Ho. Lee. Christ.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:31 PM on November 28, 2009

Tempo!
posted by The Deej at 4:22 PM on November 28, 2009

This is term defining awesome. When ever anyone uses the word awesome in the future this will be the measuring stick against which it will be compared.
posted by Mitheral at 4:23 PM on November 28, 2009

Also hot wheels track here in Canada is orange. Is it yellow in England or is that a knock off?
posted by Mitheral at 4:28 PM on November 28, 2009

That was really awesome. I was surprised that they didn't think about the bumper hitting the ramp though. It was the first thing I thought when I saw the setup, and it sounds like it almost had some pretty serious consequences.
posted by Who_Am_I at 5:18 PM on November 28, 2009

I've done this hundreds of times playing Stunts. It's corkscrews that get ya.

Doublehappy has it. It's definitely the corkscrews that get you.

Stunts 3d was a game I played often as a pre-teen/ teenager. There is a remake of it on Sourceforge, though the last time I checked it wasn't anywhere near the original.

I think the orignal Stunts was an arcade game. There is also Trackmania and a game I played on the Dreamcast as a demo. Both have loops and crazy stuff like that, but the physics on Stunts 3d were awesome (if unrealistic).
posted by robtf3 at 6:33 PM on November 28, 2009

I'm guessing they used a short car because the longer the car, the bigger the radius has to be for the car to be able to drive it without the front and back bottoming out. Heck, they had problems with this one.
posted by alexei at 6:33 PM on November 28, 2009

Something like a Jeep with it's very large approach and departure angles would have been better though I imagine the loop would have required sturdier construction because of the increased mass.
posted by Mitheral at 6:51 PM on November 28, 2009

That's what I was on edge about - not that the car would fall, but that the stress of the car's force on that cheesy track would break it or that he would drive off the side halfway through. Not too much on edge, though, because I assumed they wouldn't air the show if the driver got killed in take 1.
posted by ctmf at 10:22 PM on November 28, 2009

This was frickin' awesome.

I'm too tired from non-loop driving today (seriously - 15 miles took 6 damn hours on the Jersey Turnpike) to pull out my dusty old physics knowledge, but it seems to me like if they made the loop bigger, they could pull the same stunt at a higher speed without worrying so much about the radius danger. Is this about accurate?
posted by Navelgazer at 11:28 PM on November 28, 2009

I think the orignal Stunts was an arcade game.

You're probably thinking of Atari's Hard Drivin' from 1988, which pretty much blew my mind at the time.

A Google search for hard drivin' arcade also reveals plenty of video uploads and such.
posted by rodeoclown at 2:48 PM on November 29, 2009

This was good. And I was also surprised at the top speed. I believe they said 36mph? I would have thought WAY more than that...
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 9:24 AM on November 30, 2009

Being the fourth of four kids, by the time I was eight my family had amassed a shoebox full of matchbox cars mixed in with a dozen or so speedburners. We'd spend what seemed like hours (probably 20 minutes adult time) setting up rube goldbergian contraptions combining cars, marbles and wooden marble tracks, dominos, racetracks, playing cards, and whatever else we could find to add into the mix. While the main point of the game was always to do something new/creative, it was a given that you start with a loop de loop launching from the top of the basement stairs and ending with a speedburner car wound up just so such that the smallest bit of activation energy (usually the last of a multi-room spanning domino run) would launch it up and off a ramp through a house of flying cards, at least three levels high. Twenty minutes of setup blown in 90 seconds of run time. And then you start all over again. Repeat ad awesomeum!
posted by funkiwan at 1:08 AM on December 1, 2009