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The End Of The Mad Canadian: An Interesting Documentary Of Ken Carter’s Tragic Final Jump In A Rocket Powered Firebird (Video)


The End Of The Mad Canadian: An Interesting Documentary Of Ken Carter’s Tragic Final Jump In A Rocket Powered Firebird (Video)

Try as he did, Ken Carter was never able to make himself a household name during the stunt man boom of the 1970s. He seemed to harbor illusions that he was on the level of Evel Knievel but in reality, Ken Carter will forever be known around the world for a couple of things and neither of them are what he would have wanted. The first and most famous thing he will always be tied to is the infamous attempted one mile jump of the St Lawrence seaway in Canada with a rocket powered Lincoln coupe. He is probably best remembered for being in his hotel room when the actual jump took place. The whole amazing story is documented in the film, The Devil At Your Heels and it is an enthralling, 100% true account of the whole series of blunders that was the St Lawrence jump. The second thing he’ll be remembered for are a few years of desperate attempts to regain his footing as a premier stuntman and the stunt that took his life at a small Canadian circle track. He went from trying to jump the St Lawrence to trying to jump the pond on the property of this track and dying in the process.

Ken Carter’s name was far better known in Canada than it was in the United States although he did perform here on the southern side of the border on more than one occasion he spent most of his time traversing Canada performing jumps at drag strips and stock car tracks. The differences between he and Knievel were stark. Evel with his huge Mack truck and all of the pomp and circumstance while Carter’s act was transported around in a old trucks and school buses. He’s jump 20 cars on a Friday night, come back and do it again on Saturday, and then hit the dusty trail to do it again somewhere else the following week. While Evel was crashing at Wembley and Caesar’s Palace, Ken was breaking his ankles jumping early 1960s Chevys over a local dealer’s new inventory at a track in Nova Scotia or somewhere more remote than that.

It was all supposed to change for Carter when he started planning the St Lawrence River jump that would see him pilot a rocket powered car one mile through the air. From the start the operation Picture 41was plagued with all the typical problems. There was the money hunt, then there was the building of the incredible ramp needed to launch the car to the height and on the trajectory that was needed to clear the river, and then there was Carter himself who seemed to get more and more spooked by the idea the closer the time came to perform the jump. It took three years to lead up to the moment where he was in the car and ready to hit the button on the Sammy Miller prepared rocket engine. Five seconds before he was supposed to hit the button he bailed, citing some sort of mechanical failure. A film company which was given rights to tape the whole thing decided to make Carter’s decision easier by secretly putting American stunt driver Kenny Powers into the car while Carter was back at the hotel. Carter famously left the ramp at some 300mph and the car flew about 500ft before breaking into pieces and smashing on the rocks of the St Lawrence.

The high school dropout from Montreal had known one thing basically his entire life and that was stunt work with cars so despite being shamed and heartbroken at the outcome of a multi-year project, Carter scraped himself up and went back out on the road, performing his vaudeville act of automotive bravery and destruction to audiences in Canada and the US. All the while, Carter was working to get his name back, get the respect of his peers back, and prove (yet again) to the world that he was as good as the Knievels that got far more press and publicity than he was getting .

Carter started to get some of that juju back in 1982 when he set a “world record” (we’re not sure who certified it) when he jumped a hydrogen rocket powered Pontiac Firebird 170 feet in a ramp to ramp jump at a Canadian Association Stock Car Auto Racing event in Ontario. This feat got Carter back into the papers and it ignited his thirst to be known as the best stunt man in the world, once and for all. He planned on another “small” jump before attempting a massive, nearly 2,000ft leap over Niagra Falls (don’t these guys ever learn?) but sadly, he’d never get the chance to attempt the Niagra jump.

The final jump before he set his sights on Niagra falls was going to happen at Westgate Speedway in Peterborough, Ontario Canada.  Originally, Carter and the track agreed to a smaller stunt but when he saw the pond on the property he wanted to make it the centerpiece of the jump. A ramp was built, preparations were made, and a rocket powered early third generation Firebird was built to fly Ken across the pond to the landing ramp. The first try at this turned out to be a non-fatal disaster with the car leaving the ramp sideways and landing in the middle of the pond where

Successful 1982 jump.

Successful 1982 jump.

rescue divers had to fish Carter out. As soon as he was dragged to shore, Carter told the assembled media and fans that he’d be back later that summer to complete the job and make it across the pond. Of course he did this without ever asking the track about it but everyone signed off on the idea and Work was begun to fix the car, fix the ramp and make sure that everything went to plan on this second attempt. It didn’t.

This jump was supposed to be about 200 feet. It was going to be longer than he previous record but not exceedingly so. The idea was to break the existing record, build publicity and then set his sights on making the Niagra falls jump happen the following year. Like the St Lawrence jump, issues at the last minute began to crop up and ultimately they became Carter’s undoing. The night’s racing went so late that the scheduled afternoon jump was now going to happen in the dark of night in an area with few, if any lights. As you’ll see in the video, Carter had his crew use paint rollers and yellow road paint to color the passenger side of the car so people could actually see it in flight. Everyone who witnessed what happened next would have preferred that Carter had skipped that step.

For reasons no one is really sure of, Carter demanded that his crew add more fuel to the rocket’s tank in the back of the car. He was apparently afraid that he would not have enough steam to clear the pond with the pre-determined amount and a little more fuel would keep him in thrust longer, pushing the car further and all would be good. The extra fuel killed Ken Carter because instead of the Firebird making all of its speed leading up to the ramp, launching off, and gliding to the other side, it left the ramp with thrust pouring out of the nozzle, sent itself nearly 100ft into the air and began a sickeningly slow end over end roll that had the car falling from the sky directly onto its roof….killing Carter on impact. The cage was not designed to take that kind of impact at that angle and the thing just crushed down around him. He had flown past his landing ramp by nearly 100 feet and the car had gone twice as high as he had planned for it to go because of the additional thrust from the rocket engine. Every effort was made to save Ken Carter but it was all for naught in the end. He was dead.

This would all be a kind of legendary piece of folklore had it not been for the Canadian CHEX channel which was there for every bit of it. They were there for the failed first pond jump and the fatal second pond jump. The channel recently pulled together all of the people they could find that were there from the track owner to the safety drivers, police, camera people, etc and put together and awesome documentary about Carter and his untimely demise. We found it to be a very interesting watch, especially when hearing the stories of the crew people, news people, and even the guys that worked with Ken on the car and ramp design. If we have to credit Ken Carter with one thing it has to be the size of his “courages” and his determination to not be lost and forgotten in the shuffle while he was alive. Ken Carter is buried in an unmarked grave at a cemetery in Montreal.

Here’s the CHEX documentary about Ken Carter, it is a great news doc and an interesting watch with lots of never before seen footage. We have included another video from a guy who actually owns both the 1982 successful jump Firebird and the death jump car. Wild stuff –


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