When Papadakis Racing isn’t busy building race trailer sinks, it’s building incredible drift cars out the Toyota Supra. Papadakis’ builds are so clean, Toyota featured one in its latest promo video, and the team got behind the scenes as Toyota filmed a GR Supra’s 100 foot jump.
If you’ve ever wondered what all needs to happen for a car to get that kind of air, Papadakis has provided the answers to your most pressing questions. Questions like, ‘Would jumping my car 100 feet, then landing on a bunch of boxes save it from being destroyed?’ Turns out the answer is: kind of.
This box-jump Supra is likely a six-cylinder powered model, based on its trim and wheels. Those models weigh 3,400 pounds, and their weight has a perfect 50/50 distribution front and rear. That doesn’t mean that the car won’t nose-dive once it’s airborne — you can’t out-handle gravity, after all.
The Supra was “pretty stock,” according to Papadakis, but outfitted with a stunt car roll cage and a “custom seat with a five- or six-point harness.” Some interior trim was pulled out of the Supra, too, in order to fit the safety equipment. This means the Supra’s weight was not exactly that of a stock model. Toyota needed the car’s rear end to stay level during the jump, so the company put some ballast into the hatch (in the form of 45-pound plates) to get the perfect jump onscreen.
After a few dry runs, the Supra was ready to drive off the powdered ramp, but what’s most surprising about the whole stunt is that there’s nothing to cushion the car’s landing besides the cardboard boxes. These are pretty big, and they’re stacked three boxes high, but at the end of the day, it’s still just cardboard against all of the Supra’s weight and momentum.
The GR Supra in the stunt mostly made out alright. Papadakis says that the car’s rear suspension seemed shot and it suffered a “couple of flat tires,” but the aftermath is nowhere near as dramatic as I imagined. Of course, the 100 foot figure refers to the stunt car’s horizontal travel rather than the vertical drop, but I’m surprised those boxes provided a soft landing at all. Especially when you consider that the Supra “kind of darted into the top set of boxes,” according to Papadakis, which reduced the cardboard cushion that much more.
The GR Supra was forklifted out of there after its big jump, but it may not be so damaged that it won’t drive again. I still wouldn’t want to jump the team’s 2021 Rockstar Energy GR Supra into a bunch of boxes, though. Better to keep that awesome build going sideways — like in the footage for the promo — rather than downwards into a bunch of Prime Day boxes.
