WRX STI

Make
Subaru
Segment
Sedan

If you don't know who Travis Pastrana is, you need a weekend alone with highlight reels from Nitro Circus and the X Games. He's also driven in NASCAR and rallycross and has replicated some of daredevil Evel Knievel's most death-defying stunts. Basically, this is a guy that sees the limit and would rather try to bend the laws of physics to his will than back off. Last year, he smashed the Mt. Washington hillclimb record in his heavily modified Subaru WRX STi. This year, he's shooting a new Gymkhana film with a custom 1983 Subaru wagon. It's been going well, but with just two days of filming remaining, the driver and stuntman chased one adrenaline high too many.

According to a detailed Instagram post, Pastrana was taking a break from filming when he got the offer to perform a BASE jump off the Hyatt hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. BASE is an acronym that stands for the fixed objects from which one can jump: buildings, antennae (radio masts), spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs). You can watch the failed jump below, in which reports say that the chute opened too late to sufficiently slow him. As Pastrana says above, it was a very easy jump with everything lined up for safe execution, so this was pretty much all bad luck rather than a lack of preparation or skill. It is understood that the jump may still be used for the film, but naturally, the last two days of filming will have to wait until he's back in action. Fortunately, that shouldn't be too long.

As fans of the man know, this isn't the first time Pastrana has landed himself in hospital. In fact, he's reportedly broken more than 60 bones in his career. Thus, his condition report is surprisingly upbeat. "I can still feel my feet," said Pastrana. "And actually getting up, I'm moving already. Doctors say it's not gonna be really any worse than it was when I went in, which isn't saying much. Everything was fused down there anyways." We're not sure that we'd be so chipper if we'd just fractured a hip in multiple places, broken an L5 vertebra, and pinned our sacrum, but adrenaline junkies are built differently. At the end of the day, we're just glad that he's okay and we look forward to seeing him back in action, especially since that Subaru GL Wagon seems to be a perfect match for him.