"Stunt drivers Jimmy Canton and Bumps Willert once toured the country performing death-defying feats with ordinary cars. And they lived to tell about it."
and included Bumps discussion of his spiral jump experience:
"Willert, for example, was cajoled into making the famed 360° aerial roll in the 1974 James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun.
"I had a reputation as a pretty good car jumper, and the stunt coordinator for that movie was having trouble getting the stunt to work,"
says Willert.
"The whole thing was designed by computer, and when they put a human-sized weight in the driver's seat and sent it off the ramp, it landed perfectly. But every time they put a driver in the car, they crashed big time."
Willert, who was on tour in Europe at the time, studied photographs and films of the failed attempts and eventually determined that the problem was psychological. The corkscrew ramps were placed out of line to compensate for the sideways travel of the car as it spiraled through the air, and drivers couldn't deal with the landing ramp being out of line with the take-off ramp.
"They'd always try to help the car get there by cheating to one side as they went up the launch ramp," says Willert. "That really messed things up, because you had to be at exactly 47 miles an hour and exactly on a line they had painted on the launch ramp. They had some nasty crashes. Eventually they talked me into doing the stunt for the actual filming. I admit, it was hard to keep it on the line painted on the launch ramp, when you could see the landing ramp sitting way, way off to the side. But I did it, and the first time I did it was the take you see in the movie."
Barrel rolls were a standard part of any auto thrill show. It was considered the sign of a good stunt driver if he could roll the car, land it back on its wheels, and then drive merrily on his way.
The 360° aerial roll was eventually incorporated into several auto thrill shows. Willert did the stunt 31 times and landed safely 29 times.
"You knew as soon as you left the ramp whether it was going to work or not," he says, chuckling. "It was a spectacu1ar stunt when it worked, and a spectacular crash when it didn't." "