A Physicist Explains How the Insane 'Furious 7' Tower Jump Stunt Could Actually Happen
The Fast and Furious movies are best enjoyed with a healthy suspension of disbelief, so that you can just turn off your brain and grin at all the insane stunts that Vin Diesel and his crew pull in their souped-up rides. But some stunts are so singularly wild, it’s hard not to wonder: Wait, could you actually do that?
In Furious 7, perhaps the most mind-boggling, “No, way, dude!” stunt is the jump that Dom Toretto (Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) pull between the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi while driving in a Lykan HyperSport, the third most expensive car in the world (price tag: $3.4 million).
But get this: According to Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, PhD, a physicist and the author of The Physics of NASCAR, that stunt — which spans 150 feet, and includes a two-story fall — is technically possible.
“The key to these really complex stunts is you break it up into elements,” Leslie-Pelecky told us during a visit to the Yahoo Movies studio, which you can watch in the video above. “Every one of those elements is possible to do. The catch is, you have to make them all work, one after another. So while these stunts are possible, they’re also highly improbable.”
Leslie-Pelecky broke down the physics of how the jump could really happen above. That said, we still don’t recommend trying it on your own.
