Rob Dyrdek's car kickflip

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Can Rob Dyrdek Kickflip a Car?

Find out on Dec. 17.Tags: actionsports, skateboard, Rob Dyrdek

Can Rob Dyrdek Kickflip a Car?

The highlight reel of Rob Dyrdek's life just got another segment dedicated to death-defying stunt work. On Saturday morning at Southern California's Magic Mountain amusement park, the 37-year-old reality TV star and pro skateboarder buckled in for a 50-foot ramp-to-ramp jump in what he's dubbed the "kickflip car."

Cruising a modified 2012 Chevy Sonic at precisely 43 mph, Dyrdek launched from a wave-shaped takeoff ramp that pitched the car into a barrel roll, the vehicle's spiraling motion essentially duplicating the look of one of skateboarding's staple tricks, the kickflip. He touched down on the landing ramp with some impact, corrected his steering, burned some rubber and rolled away.

"I don't know if you can prepare for something like this," Dyrdek told ESPN earlier this month. "I did a bunch of random stunt training, like jumping out of windows and jumping off a roof. And I did jump the car and flipped it into [a landing pit of] boxes to get the feel of it. That in itself was scary."

Dyrdek was not the first to do the stunt. The Astro Spiral Jump, as it was called, made its public debut at the Houston Astrodome on Jan. 12, 1972, during the American Thrill Show, a stunt-heavy stadium spectacle promoted by race car driver Jay Milligan in the 1960s and '70s. The stunt made further headway into the American psyche a few years later as a brief but memorable scene in the James Bond feature film "The Man With the Golden Gun." The jump is also credited with being the first stunt calculated by computer modeling, according to IMDb.

Courtesy Rob Dyrdek Dyrdek with the car that took him on a roll.

Precedent or not, says Dyrdek, the stunt ranks up there with the most dangerous situations he's deliberately put himself into, including jockeying a racehorse at 40 mph, bull riding and being attacked by a tiger and a shark.

Before the jump, Dyrdek said, "As with any major stunt I've done, any crazy sort of thing, I have to drift into this do-or-die mentality to execute it."

The car kickflip will be featured this spring during the Season 5 premier of Rob Dyrdek's "Fantasy Factory."

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Keith Hamm

Action Sports

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