The James Bond car used in the famous corkscrew stunt in The Man with the Golden Gun will be making people gasp again when it comes up for auction on Friday.
The AMC Hornet X “Astro-Spiral” stunt car was driven by Sir Roger Moore, with redneck sheriff JW Pepper in the passenger seat, before a stuntman took the controls in the 1974 film.
The stunt double drove the Hornet over the remains of a collapsed bridge, corkscrewing across a river and landing safely on four wheels on the opposite riverbank.
The stunt was conceived by famed racing and stunt driver Jay Milligan and following successful execution of the trick at Houston Astrodome, Milligan contacted the producers of the Bond series and offered it to them.
Bond car stunt patented so it couldn’t be copied
The producers snapped it up and filed a patent to ensure no one else could copy it on film.
To safely execute the stunt on location in Thailand under the limitations of a movie set was quite a tall order.
It took the groundbreaking work of the Calspan Corporation and engineer Raymond R McHenry to create a system that ultimately enabled the Bond car to perform the trick successfully.
Following extensive research, engineering, and programming, the trick was exhaustively planned before the first ramp was built.
Bond car undamaged after corkscrew stunt
So successful was this planning that the Bond car, piloted by stunt driver Loren “Bumps” Willard, landed exactly where the simulation predicted after hitting the ramp at exactly 40 mph, all in a single take.
The Bond car, and stunt driver, survived the jump undamaged.
Offered from the Jay Milligan collection, the car is operable and remains in “as-jumped” condition.
The engine and chassis numbers match those on the shipping invoice created when the car was sent from the filming location in Thailand back to Jay Milligan’s JM Productions in New York.
Bond car auction presents “once in a lifetime opportunity”
According to the Auctions America brochure the sale of the AMC Hornet X on September 1, 2017, represents a “once in a lifetime opportunity to own a truly significant piece of automotive, technological and film history”.
Which Bond car leaves you in 007th heaven. Check out our favourites.
The team at Adrian Flux like a challenge and they would happily cover 007, despite his somewhat suspect track record with cars. Find out what happened the last time Flux ran the numbers for Bond’s insurance on his favourite car, the Aston Martin DB7.
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