Successfully jumping a vehicle is a lot harder than it looks in the movies. And while a lot of cautionary tales on YouTube feature factory pickups being launched dozens of feet in the air, this clip making the rounds on Facebook this weekend shows that even a purpose-built desert pre-runner truck can fly a little too high for its own good.
It’s not clear when exactly the video was shot, but with the Baja 1000 just a few weeks away, it’s as good a time as any to watch someone’s dreams of desert-bashing glory crumple into a pile of broken suspension components. The truck appears to be a modified Chevrolet C/K from the mid-1990s, sitting on a set of long travel shocks and control arms and probably some sort of custom or swapped frame.
It certainly looks the business at it charges towards the camera, obscured by a small hill until it hits the ramp and comes flying gloriously into view. Unfortunately, the glory is short-lived; the truck lands with a sickening crunch and collapses into the ground at a weird angle. The camerman lets out a long “Ohhhh sh*t,” and you can see the unfortunate occupants of the truck struggle to come to grips with what transpired.
The caption for the video is “When you get your first pre-runner”—these kinds of video descriptions are notoriously unreliable, but you can hear the someone off camera remarking “Well, that didn’t last too long,” so there may be a grain of truth there. The rest of the video shows the driver struggling in vain to get the truck to move under its own power before jacking it up to examine the damage in full.
It’s a good thing to keep in mind—the bigger the toy, the harder they break.