Matt Jones: The Scariest Moment of My Entire Career

In this clip from the full podcast, Matt Jones gives us an exclusive look behind his latest Red Bull project – The Impossible Gap, where we see him jump through two autonomous moving trucks. What started as a sketch on paper turned into one of the most technical, dangerous, and calculated stunts ever attempted on a mountain bike.

In this episode, Matt explains how the idea came about, how long it took to plan, and what it felt like to line up for a jump that gave him just 0.8 seconds between two 8-tonne trucks. From coordinating with Scania engineers to battling nerves and trusting a red-to-green GPS light to signal go-time, Matt breaks down every part of this insane project.

This is the full story of the impossible gap, where precision meets chaos, and one wrong move could have ended it all.

Full podcast out now: https://youtu.be/TJ1flnPchMs

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If you like freak out last minute and pop off this ramp, you’d take your head off. From the two cabs opening up and revealing lights, like revealing my window to jump through to the back slamming shut again was 0.8 seconds. I remember telling some mates, they’re like, “No, don’t do that one.” Like, why? Why? Any imperfection in its curtains? We’re here ultimately cuz you’ve just released another nuts video. This time you decided to jump through two moving trucks, which I’m still not convinced is a great idea, but you survived. Where does an idea like that come from? Give us some kind of um background on how you come up with this stuff or whether people come to you. Yeah, it’s a good question. I don’t have a straight answer. It was 100% my idea cuz I I drew it and sent it to Hugh, who was my athlete manager at the time a year ago. Um, but I I’m obsessed with like I’m quite into how things line up and I don’t want to like trip myself up and sound like a complete weirdo, but like you know when you’re driving down the road like you see like lamp post lining up with things and I’ve got I like engage with that and I remember seeing trucks pass through and I I at the time I thought you could like you could ride a motorbike through that. There was I saw a curtainer open and then there was another low loader with like a digger on it and I thought there’s a split second in time where like light came through there and imagine going on a motor bike. I don’t know why I thought motorbike, but then um I was trying to come up with ideas for Red Bull projects and just pitched that and I drew it. I drew it on like up a a grass bank onto a main road, two lorries passing through, me jumping through it. And Red Bull said to me like, “You know what? Firstly, we’ve spoken to some of the people in the office. Everyone loves it. They think it’s so engaging.” Most of them said it’s probably not possible, but if you think you can do it, 100%. And not only that, but they had a a partner in mind, which was Scanya. Yeah. who make now autonomous trucks, autonomous lorries that are driverless, which I mean, we should probably get to that, but it made the it made the project work cuz those two trucks needed to cross each other at exactly the right time for me to pass through them getting towed in by a car. It’s quite a lot of moving parts. Yeah, it’s nuts, eh? So, what are the steps then? So, you’ve drawn this, you’ve sketched it, you’ve sent it to your athlete manager and they’ve said, “Yeah, we’re in. Let’s go.” Like, how do you get from there to the day where you’re suddenly on site with these trucks? That was a so yes between like an idea to reality was a year. Okay. Um because we need you know we relied on Scania. So we went and met them in Sweden. Then we went back to like look for a location. They have a training plate. Well not a training place like a test area near a runway where they’ve already got this GPS grid all set up so that their autonomous trucks can be used there. But it was a where we ended up doing it was actually a public road. Like we had to keep moving the ramps out the way for the postman to come. And a farmer wanted to dump like a massive massive truck of like actual human poo essentially. And when like the guy, one of the safety people was like on the radio, yeah, he wants to dump it. And he says where he usually dumps his [ __ ] is by the wooden ramp. We like having to having to battle all that. Um, but yeah, it was it was strange that a crossroad in Sweden became my home for a week trying to bring this project to life and with success, you know. Yeah. What was it like when you were first on site and you saw all the moving parts together like these two trucks gliding past each other, these ramps in place, you run up your your towing car. How did you feel? The the most daunting, the most like sobering moment was the first time I watched the two trucks pass and I’m just stood on the side of the road. like I’ve hung around moving traffic, but I don’t really spend much time around in the back of lorries and things and they’re they’re gnarly. It’s dangerous. Um all the wheels and like they’re loud and I just thought this is this is very different to when I drew it, you know, like you can’t you can’t mess this up. And then we had to figure out so many details. How fast am I going to get towed in? What angle’s the ramp going to be? Will I hit my head on the top of the truck? It’s one thing the timing getting through, but if you like freak out last minute and pop off this ramp, you’d take your head off. Um, lots of Yeah. Lots of variables, but I’m quite good at that, like working through it step by step and building a a functioning plan. But this one relied on so many other people and so many other moving parts. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll talk about that a bit cuz that I find that pretty interesting. But I want to talk about the towing car cuz I know you like your cars. It feels like that wasn’t an accident. That’s a pretty smart towing vehicle. Yeah. An Audi, was it an Audi RSQ8? big old 600 horsepower family SUV. We needed good brakes. Okay. Um I go through both trucks. That was the plan. But the car can’t. The car towing me in driving at moving driving at a crossroads, moving traffic, and I need to let go of the handle as late as possible to not then decelerate and face variable factors like wind and rolling up the ramp. So the later I can release the handle, the more consistent I am. But that requires the car to slam on the brakes as late as possible. So the driver James had a pretty gnarly job. You know, he’s also driving a car at these trucks, but he has to stamp like left foot brake and stamp. And even when I whiz past the car freewheeling, like you can hear the you hear skidding up to the traffic and it made the whole thing more epic. But that was the only way. What speed were you getting towed in at? 43 mph. Okay. Yeah. 69 km an hour. Yeah. What speed are the trucks doing? Uh 20 each. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So combined overlap of 40 mph for the trucks as well, which is quite has quite a scissoring effect. Your margin of error here, right, for either getting taken out by the front of one truck or the back of the other is tiny. Was it8 of a second or something? That’s what that’s what I worked out and it was about right was Yeah. From from the two cabs opening up and revealing lights like revealing my window to jump through to the back slamming shut again was 0.8 seconds. But when I’m starting a quarter a mile away and I have to ride arrive within that point8. Um that’s tough. Yeah. That’s and it’s hard to be like revved up for that long. This is where the technology comes in. Right. So the trucks like you say are autonomous. They’re driving themselves. There’s no one in the cab of these things. And you had I think you’ve got a a GPS grid like you said on the site anyway for Scania’s work. And then you’ve got GPS in both the trucks and the towing car. So you came up with like an ingenious system of like a stop go light on the back of the car. Right. That’s it. So, so the trucks needed to be autonomous. The project lived and died with the the trucks crossing over at exactly the right time. Um cuz I’m I can’t track two things at once. Like you can kind of cross the road. You can ride a bike at a road and and follow a car with your eyes right and think I I’m going to skim in the back of that car if it’s traveling at constant speed, but you can’t follow two things. And when I arrived, I realized that there’s there are too many factors. So James had to manually drive the car and tow me in and you just can’t. And I had little pegs in the ground and I I started off thinking like the front of that truck needs to line up with my peg and and that front of that one needs to line up with that peg when I’m here trying to like split my eyes and if it does that and then so then uh the the engineers that are doing all the programming for the autonomy, they wrote a program which tracks the two trucks and what at what point they’re going to arrive at the ramp. And the car towing me had a GPS unit in it. So on the back of the car towing me there was a track Yeah. was a light. It was red. if the variable if it wasn’t a perfect system, i.e. I’m way off. I’m not going to get there at the right moment. But if I was within 0.1 seconds of what I deemed to be the right point of the trailer, it was green. But once it turns green, it won’t change. So I was then trust like, you know, you got 1 second to like let go the handle, hold on. You like it things could change. But it took so long to get a green light and to get everything to marry up that once I saw green, I was like, I have to jump through it, man. I’m not might not get this chance again. It’s a bit different to what you normally do though, right? So, normally you’re putting faith in your own ability to execute something and you control you. You know, you pretty well, right? This time you’re putting your faith in some engineers and some satellites and everything to just like turn into a green light on a truck and go. Was that hard? It was a weird mountain bike project cuz I’ve I’ve been I’ve been that scared before like with that River Gap hard line um at Darkfest. I jumped that 110T jump which is Yeah. like the biggest jump in the world. The risk’s huge, but all of that stuff, you do it on your own terms. When I’m ready, I’m going to go and this this is the one. The conditions are perfect. It’s now like it’s now or never. But with this project, I had to have that same full 100% like mental fortitude, I suppose, like I’m putting your life on the line, but had to do it over and over and over and over again, just staring at a red or green light. So, it’s really hard to maintain that that level of like calm but also confidence for hours and hours on end without me knowing when it’s going to be go time. It almost made me feel quite like cold to the whole thing later on in the day. I’ I’d like been so focused that that almost like wore wore that part of my brain out and I just ended up numb to it. Yeah. Nuts, isn’t it? You had family there as well. Does that help you or is that it also kind of reminds you of what you have to lose, I guess. Yeah. gnarly question. Um, my my wife was there, my brother was there. So, like I said, it was a year planning this whole thing. Um, and I obviously like let loved one know, let loved ones know I’ve got this project coming up in Sweden. We’re flying out there for a test next week. And it’s like, oh, what is it? It’s like, oh, it’s basically there’s just two lorries. I’m going to jump kind of like through them as they cross each other. It’s like, wait, wait, go back. What do you mean through them? It’s like, no, don’t worry. Like, it’s going to be really easy. Anyone could do it. I’m just lucky. I was always downplaying it cuz most people would say like don’t do that of all the things I remember turning to mates like don’t do that one like why why I believed in it. I believed in the maths and the timing and that really it it was like the easiest scariest thing I’ve ever done. Like anyone could do it. You just hold a handle sat down on a bike and if the light’s green you put your hand on the handlebars and go in a straight line. But if you if you like to freak out or turn left or turn right or break, like none of those work. All of them mean you get run over or if you pop too much because you freak out, you’ll hit your head. So you have to be like like robotic yourself with it. So I found that pretty interesting like to try and stay in that state where it’s like just do what it says. Yeah. You’re quite savvy on the kind of maths and engineering front. You were going to study mechanical engineering at university, right? Do you think that helped you rationalize cuz like you say you’re trusting these other people that have written a code and Yeah. like do you think that that fact that you can appreciate and understand the engineering helped you trust it? Yeah. If I if I’m honest I’d have never done it if I wasn’t 100% amongst it with the the maths and the timing because um the the engineers doing the autonomy have never done that before. They’re they’re programming lorries eventually to deliver things around the world without drivers. But I wasn’t sure that they had the they had the same mission as me when I arrived. They didn’t quite get what I was doing. They’re up for making trucks cross, but they they were always focused on the cabs crossing, but I needed the cabs to cross first and jump through. And there was loads of like stuff that’s lost in translation. It’s like, wow, we’ve done all this planning and we’re on different like wavelengths here. So, I spent a lot of time like sat down with them and it’s like, right, what happens if this? What happens if that? What happens if this? and I still wasn’t sold. And then I re I spun it and like they’re engineers, right? They just love maths and tasks and I just said to them like, “Right, I challenge you to make the car arrive at the at the point that I cross 6 m into the trailer.” And like when I switched it to a direct command, like a not command, wrong word, but like a challenge, they’re suddenly like, “Yeah, we can do that.” Whereas they Yeah. Like when it was all hypothetical and it was like what happens if and do you think I never got like solid answers when it’s like guys try and do this they were like yeah perfect we love that. It’s like quite binary in a way. Yeah totally. That’s probably how I think as well. Fair. And so you’ve got it dialed in. You’re happy with things. You did like a test jump with a gap. You did a test through a single trailer. How did it feel going through that trailer the first time just on its own? Single felt mad cuz it was again like riding it moving traffic. You got something close to your head. Your wheels are really close to the bottom and you got something Well, when you go up the ramp, there’s a metal cab in the way. There’s a Yeah. 8 ton truck at the top of the ramp and then but as you ride up the ramp it, it moves out your way. Never had that before. But one truck was 1.6 seconds, which is ample time, but two trucks is half, you know, and the windows literally half the size. So once we did one, everyone was super confident then. It’s like, right, this is on. Yeah. And you had a lot of run-ups, right, with red light, red light, red light. you were losing light of the day and you ended up having to kind of call it and come back the following day to do it. Yeah, that’s a horrific situation to be in. Like, how did you sleep that night? And how do you get geared back up again to to put yourself at risk again? Yeah, I was so we almost had it. We were actually within 200ths of a second of a green on the last run, but we didn’t know that. I don’t know how red is a red and how green is a green. So, went away feeling pretty devastated that it could have got done. And we had we had a bar booked in Stockholm that night. Like we thought we were all going to be partying and like patting each other on the back. But then yeah, back to the hotel, rubbish night’s sleep, thinking what happens in the morning, are the conditions going to be different? If it’s windy, does all the math still work? You know, but then we got it done quite quick the next day and then just got got drunk at the airport instead of the bar. Yeah. Do you can you sleep on nights like that? Like are you able to just put that out of your head? And I’ve I’ve always been a bad sleeper. Quite a knackered guy. So yeah, I just I’m up in the night thinking about stuff. I the I I the more that time went on, the more I felt I had to like tweak things. So even in the night, I was thinking like I was watching back a POV of me jumping through one truck and thinking actually that’s that’s not going to work. The back’s going to clip me. I need to tell the engineers we need to I need to arrive.1 second earlier. We need to rewrite the code. But then will I then have to do one trip? So I’m like I ended up second guessing myself. Yeah, I bet. Whereas when you get on a roll and you’ve got like a clear road map, things are easier. There’s nothing worse than like a long night of panicking. Is there? Definitely not. So, how did it feel when you got that green light? Were you just able to lock in and go? Yeah, literally locked in. Um, I was scared. I think I I definitely screamed when I went through it and I remember the back of the second trailer like being in my peripheral vision and coming at me and and I almost like I think I end up like kind of tuck my elbow and shoulder in, but it wasn’t even that close. But I can’t describe the feeling of riding up a ramp where you can’t see the landing cuz there’s two vehicles. Then they reveal like this tunnel of light and you’re like there’s the landing. But then you from both sides you see these backs coming and you’re like this is too late to pull out now. But I was locked in. You can feel it closing on you then when when you’re kind of in the moment. Yeah. And just the bottom of the trailers going in different directions under your wheels. Real close to your wheels. And I felt like my head’s closed. There’s all like, you know, I was I was never closer than a foot from hitting my head or a foot from hitting my wheels or even probably 2 meters from the sides, but that’s a tiny window when it things are moving and you know it’s like four. The other gnarly thing was cuz the trucks are autonomous, right? They have sensors and cameras. Um once they crossed they were they were programmed to not stop for another 50 meters cuz I could trick a sensor or something and they’d see the car and do something weird. So we didn’t want that. We wanted everything to be smooth. But then it the safety guy came over and was like um yeah I’ve realized that if you get stuck under a lorry it’s going to carry on for 50 m and I don’t have any equipment to cut you out. So then they got a a Norwegian like fire safety team down the next day who thankfully just sat in sat in fold out chairs and didn’t have to do any work. But yeah, I think it’s sometimes easier to not know all those details. I was going to say having those conversations is probably not what you want to hear, is it? No, that it’s a funny old project. Like I’ve done some big jumps and I’ve done some stuff where it’s super high risk, but I’ve I’ve always found that most of the projects and jumps I do is like as long as I’m like within 90% of perfect, I’ll be all right. Like I could probably get away with casing that jump or if I go deep, I’ll be able to take it. I’ll be able to land like pull it. Whereas this one like it has to be perfect. like any imperfection in its curtains is like um so that’s why I was actually stoked that we had a team of clever people and everyone knew by the end like knew the risks and were thinking in the same wavelength and then you you make something happen and it feels easy. Fair play, mate. Impressive stuff. Yeah. Cheers. I’m stoked in the video, man. It’s a hard one to tell tell that story that went on for so long and it’s like an 8minute video, but a lot went into it and I think it’s a cool it’s a cool moment that people can relate to. Yeah, 100%. you can see the buildup and what you went through to get there. So, yeah. Good on you, man. [Music]