With Travis Pastrana and the Nitro Circus mob in town ADB Ed Mitch Lees took the opportunity to catch-up with the FMX legend to talk about their latest regional tour.
ML: So why “Next Level” tour?
TP: Exactly that, we literally take it to the next level. At the half time mark we take the ramp and double it, right in front of the crowd. That’s it. Until this tour we were limited on what we could do, it’s been very similar, but, as scary as this is, I want the guys to go out there with butterflies. The riders have to be pumped, tackling each other, then you know they’re pumped and then the crowd will be.
ML: Give us an idea of how crazy?!
TP: One of the guys landed his first ever backflip on a three-wheeler. I thought for sure he was going to eat shit. He did three practice jumps into the airbag and they were all horrible. But he thought, stuff it, and he threw down. He lands goes up into the crowd grabs someone’s beer out of their hand and does a shooter. We just want our guys to go out there and scare themselves and just have fun.
ML: What can spectators look forward to from this tour?
TP: Every show changes because we have different riders with different home towns. Every show will be different. I want three guys double backflipping and two guys front flipping in a train by the end of the tour. We don’t save anything for later tours but you just don’t know which rider is going to be most pumped on the night.
Mitch Lees: So is it back-to-back weekends while you’re here?
Travis Pastrana: Almost. We will head home for a week over Easter and then come back to finish the tour.
ML: So why outdoor?
TP: This is what makes it really cool, with no restrictions on height, because there’s no roof, we can bring the really big ramps out. This was the first time some of these guys had jumped off ramps this big. Everything worked great. For example, Adam Jones has never landed on an airbag before or hit one of these big ramps, he’s a bit more old-skool, but his first time on these jumps he landed and broke his wrist. But a few weeks later he came back and nailed a basic trick but he was stoked because these ramps are so big.
ML: What is the Moon Booter?
TP: It’s a ramp that sends us about 60ft off the ground and most indoor arenas are about 50-55ft high, so we can’t use that ramp indoor. This is like our big air tour! We’d like to hit indoor stadiums but we can’t with ramps this big.
ML: Who developed the Moon Booter?
TP: We had two people front flipping it on the first night and three guys double backflipping. Sheehan did four double backflips in one show! Our goal was to double back flips with variations which was hard on a regular kicker. You’d wreck your nuts! So we developed this ramp that would send us 60ft high. The ramp is 14ft as opposed to the standard 6ft ramp. We actually developed a ramp that sent Sheehan 100ft in the air and he could do the triple backflip but we’d need about 15 vehicles to take it around. This tours ramps are huge but we’ve got bigger tour stuff planned with the triple flip ramp next year… [sorry guys, the rest of this part of the convo was off the record].
ML: I was expecting to see you in a cast? But it’s missing, does that mean you will be back soon?
TP: I’ve dislocated my wrist plenty of times before really bad and I did it again back in December but it’s getting better. It’s fine. I’m planning on performing in two weeks’ time!
ML: So does it feel any different nowadays compared to your first freestyle competition?
TP: We had a time where I was racing NASCAR and I left the creative side of Nitro to a team of people that didn’t quite have the same drive as us moto guys. They used standard ramps and shooters but I wanted to do something better and bigger. There wasn’t any progression. So last year we fired the CEO and the riders took back over running the company.
So it allowed us to take it back in the rider’s hands and go even bigger and a lot of guys were getting injured because of it. But that’s the nature of FMX, you don’t just push the ramps into place and set them there, you’ve got to keep pushing the boundaries which is what we’ve done with this tour.
ML: So Nitro has found its mojo again and decided you can’t set limits on what to do?
TP: Yep. Don’t get me wrong, a double backflip is still really hard, just to take a hand off can take months or years to master, but to make it better we need to elevate the jumps and make it bigger. Yes, that makes it more dangerous, but we want to bring more excitement back in the tour.