Calamity and All, The Show Must Go On: Reflecting on my First Year of Video

“I cannot believe you get paid to do this,” the police officer said, waving his hand through a cloud of smoke thick enough to obscure an entire block of million-dollar houses.

“I can’t believe you’re letting me do this,” I laughed right before I laid another couple hundred feet of black stripes so dark they’re visible from space.

This was a surreal experience, even for me, and it comes thanks to the miracle of making Ignition and Head 2 Head. See, when I create written reviews, I typically commit crimes against machines far away, in quiet corners of the Earth. In the story I casually neglect to include self-incriminating events such as: Our clinically insane photographer used bolt cutters to open a gate onto a military airfield and then talked me into doing a 100-mph drift down the runway for a picture. Even if that’s what actually happened.

I also once popped two tires in a Mazdaspeed3 on a particularly hard landing while drift-jumping it off a sidewalk—at the request of the same photographer, of course. All remaining photos were static, the car leveled using a scissor jack that he simply Photoshopped out. No one ever knew. Well, except Mazda. Sorry, Mazda.

When you’re creating a video, there’s no Photoshop to fix damage after the fact. And you can’t do horrible things guerrilla-style on someone else’s property because you typically need to do everything a dozen times until the car is in exactly the spot where the cameras are focused. Except even then, something else ruins the shot, like a spider running across the lens, the camera freezing up, or an elderly squirrel farting in the background that messes up the sound. So when we’re making videos, we obtain permission, close roads, and take our time. That’s how I wound up nearly asphyxiating a smiling police officer with Pilot Sport-branded tear gas.

I’ve done more damage to cars in the past year making videos than in a decade writing for print. Forgive us.

Getting permission keeps you out of jail, but it does nothing when you really mess the car up. Like, for example, grazing a tire wall with the back of a Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 on the first of three days of filming. The show must go on, I explained that midnight to the visibly irritated casino security guards who wondered aloud what I was doing in their parking lot with a 100-foot-long extension cord hooked to the strongest paint buffer I could find at Pep Boys, using the gnarliest rubbing compound 3M makes to grind off the nastiest skid marks you’ve ever seen down the side of a Mustang. It’s a shame Pep Boys doesn’t carry orange touchup paint.

Not that touchup paint would have helped during the off-roading episode where we nearly destroyed two $200,000 trucks before a single camera had been turned on. Jonny forgot to lock the front hubs and drove his unintentionally two-wheel-drive ICON FJ right out of the parking lot and into 3 feet of mud, getting stuck immediately and filling the pristine interior (which was scheduled to accompany the rest of the pristine truck into a museum two days later) with enough mud to drop the ride height a full inch.

Several muddy minutes later, I pulled the FJ out using a tow rope and a V-12-powered Mercedes Geländewagen then parked the G atop a small rock in a smug demonstration of its unstoppability and indestructibility. Gravity must have been particularly strong that day because the Benz’s tire slid right off the rock, smashing a very expensive heat exchanger and putting a distinct diagonal bend on the bumper.

We did what we had to do: unpacked the cameras and recreated the whole disaster for film. Which became even more fun when the FJ’s transmission selector cable melted and I had to start it using a highly conductive machete to short the positive battery lead to the starter solenoid.

From neighborhood burnouts to smashed bumpers, I’ve done more damage to cars in the last year of making videos than I have in the preceding decade writing reviews for print and web. So although I am asking you to watch our videos (Ignition here, Head 2 Head here), I’m also asking for forgiveness if you occasionally notice some damage. If you’re nice, maybe one day we’ll even show you the blooper reel.

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