Fearless at the 500
At the Indianapolis 500 in late May, a sellout crowd and a big TV audience got to see a special launch of a new promotional campaign from the venerable toy maker, Mattel and Hot Wheels, that was as theatrical as it was spectacular: Hot Wheels Fearless at the 500, sponsored by Izod.
They turned to Humphrey, and not one, but all three of his companies participated in the project. Applied Electronics, Staging Dimensions, and Light Action played “kids” again, though the stakes were considerably higher than catching the family pet unawares or losing the car under the bed. It was a real race car driven by one of the best drivers in the world, Tanner Foust.
There was nothing miniature about what Hot Wheels did. A 100-foot door with an attached orange ramp was “a feat of engineering, and it’s a jaw-dropping sight when you see it,” Hot Wheels vice president of marketing Simon Waldron told The Associated Press. It was also one for the record books, as Foust broke the old record for a jump like this by 31 feet, traveling 332 feet in the air before touching down on the landing ramp.
It’s all part of a three-year promotion, Humphrey explains. “They are kicking off a whole new line of Hot Wheels, starting with this event.” Murphy Productions, which has hired Humphrey before, reached out to his trio of companies for this project. “They gave us the concepts and preliminary drawings and we just took it from that to manufactured product.” Humphrey had worked with Murphy Productions before, and the “Big Air” ramp he built for them for an FIS ski and snowboarding event held in Denver’s Civic Center Park earlier this year shared a similar concept, but this was “on another level. They were trying to break a world record, and we had to design something that gave the driver flexibility with the ramp.”
Flexibility — and Speed
The ramp was unusually flexible, like a … well, like a plastic Hot Wheels track.
Time was one of the biggest challenges. They had to build the ramp and test it in California. There the driver had to run it to make sure he could make the distances he needed too, and Foust had a busy jet-setting schedule that demanded accommodation.
“We built the thing is six weeks, and it took all three companies,” Humphrey says. “Staging Dimensions took care of the designs and construction of the ramp, Applied took care of the construction of the tower that was made to look like a door, and Light Action’s Andy Rougvie assembled both installations at the test site and at Indy.”
They were able to use some rental pieces out of inventory, “but for the most part this was a custom fabrication, and everything was designed for this particular product.”
Mike Chouinard of Staging Dimensions, principle designer on the project, says that portions of the structures were built to be truly flexible: a corkscrew, a positive curve, a negative curve are among the possibilities. And strong: “You could drive a Peterbilt across the track.” Andrew Tinari, a designer at Applied Electronics, was also a major contributor to the project.
Another big challenge was that Humphrey and team had three separate engineering firms to answer to.
“They all wanted to look over all parts of it and sign off on it. That was good, it’s just you have to keep in mind that we’re designing the structure in a specific time frame, so when one would came back and say, ‘You need to change this,’ it just made it tricky.”
Down to a Science
Humphrey notes we are far beyond the days of Evel Knievel flying by the seat of his pants. “Today, it’s all physics, and the driver knows exactly how fast he needs to be going when he hits the bottom of the ramp to achieve the distance.”
So how to make it so the ramp so flexible, yet stand up to so much weight?
“We gave a lot of consideration to all aspects of this,” Chouinard says. One aspect was particularly “inspirational:” “When you do things like this involving scaffolding, it limits your flexibility.” They solved this by assembling the track sections on the ground in 32-foot and 66-foot pieces. It was engineered so that just two crewmembers on the ground could string together a 32-foot run of radius truss together in 10 minutes. These could then be assembled into the 5-foot wide grid and skinned by the rest of the crew. Then the crane lifted the large sub-assemblies, put them in place, and held them together with big steel pins.
“We actually designed the ramp so you could change the curve — the steel truss we designed worked like a scorpion tail, and it can be adjusted in four and six foot increments,” Humphrey says. “That was an interesting design idea, because when the client wants to do more jumps in the future, we’re not tied to one angle.”
Structural Support
Although Chouinard notes that “a lot of labor was involved in the field putting the plywood skin on the steel substructure and painting it orange,” the number of crew members needed for the structural assembly was surprisingly small. The drop-in was made up of main tower assembly. “The top radius knuckle, the 66-foot straight run, and the articulating truss sections forming the lower radius were all kept in the air with slender steel columns and a couple of aluminum truss columns so as to not detract from the desired aesthetics.”
The foundation of this mammoth structure was important, as they couldn’t just rest this on anything — its weight would create a huge hole. So 16-by-7-foot foundation pieces with 32 adjustable screw jacks underneath them did the job. “We had to lay out the bases very precisely, because once the crane lifted the sections, the ‘legs’ dangled and then need to drop exactly in place.”
Chouinard is perhaps most proud of the take-off ramp portion of the project. “It’s hydraulically adjustable and modular, so you can change the shape and length,” he says. “You can make it more curvy, more flat, inflect this side or that.” The entire base frame and deck structure can move on rails as a complete assembly so the jump distance can be increased as the driver gets more comfortable.
Humphrey says he wasn’t nervous about the project, but he had concerns. “What I thought about most was Mother Nature. I was confident about everything my team was doing, but two or three days before we were setting up there were all those tornados. We built them to handle high winds, but…”
A Successful Launch
By all measures, the event was a success. Tanner Foust piloted the race car through the air, with the controlled jump having just the right amount of instability — one wheel touching down first after clearing the immense gap between launch and landing ramp, and an end-of-ramp skid to point to the very real danger — but with driver and race car emerging unscathed. And the promotion? “They had over 400,000 hits on their site, and their Youtube site is at over 4.5 million views.” So expect to see more.
“The industry seems to increasingly need a bigger box of Lego’s to play with as these projects become more extreme and the concept people start to really see the almost limitless possibilities there can be when you get the right team of people and their respective companies involved,” Chouinard adds. “Next year this might seem ‘small.’”
