Recollections of "Bullitt"

[Flyin_Freddie]

I know, I know...not a real movie, but there were some interesting car stunts in it, and I love the premise of the whole thing. One of the stunts involves jumping the Firebird through the open doors of a moving boxcar....into one side of the open doors, straight through and out the other side! I've seen a "You Asked For It" kind of program that featured how they did this stunt. Ramps were built, and the train came by several times with each run being timed as accurately as possible. From those timing runs, they calculated just when the car had to start, how fast it had to accelerate and exactly when it had to hit the ramp. After more calculating, the stunt driver said he had it...and then proceeded to do it in ONE TAKE! It was most impressive...cleared the doors, the sides of the rail car, the other doors, etc. Pretty neat...!

On a side note, while picking up a Porsche 944 on the Porsche Club 'Treffen' in 1984, we were tearing across France on our way back to Stuttgart, Zuffenhausen, to have the car prepared for shipping back to USA. Well as we were haulin' butt across France, I let some of the other folks on the tour get a little too far in front of me and my wife, so we were pretty much letting it all hang out trying to catch up to them. The road went down across this valley and we could see a railroad coming into us at about a 30 degree angle from the left. As we approached the crossing, we had to make a slight left then an immediate slight right in order to cross the tracks at a right angle. But, there was also a small road right in front if us that paralleled the tracks. Well, hell, I was doing about 80-85, and when the crossing came up, I had to make an immediate decision whether to jog left, or take the smaller road. So, I just went straight down the smaller road....that turned out to be a dirt road! I jammed on the brakes, dust flyin' everywhere, jammed it into reverse, and nailed the throttle while I sidestepped the clutch...more dust everywhere, tires squallin' in the dirt and then squealin' when I hit the pavement again. My wife is laughing and hollering "SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT! SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT!"...I'm dying laughin' at all this, as I nailed the throttle in first and headed for the railroad crossing to my left. But the funniest part was this little Frenchman, standing on the other side of the tracks sorta leaning on a shovel. He was just to the left of the crossing, and he was laughing and pointing down the road we should have taken...gesturing that "They went that-a-way!" We honked, threw him a wave and as we were all three laughing our asses off, Karen and I flew across the tracks and kept on with the chase. We've often remembered this incident and we always both wind up laughing about it all over again! We've also often wondered about what the little Frenchman said to his wife that evening!