PORT ANGELES — Bob Hanna keeps saying he’s dropping the daredevil game.
Before the 76-year-old stunt veteran does that, however, he’s going to drop a car . . . 150 feet.
Hanna and his World Champion Auto Daredevils come to the Clallam County Fairgrounds, 1608 W. 16th St. in Port Angeles, on Friday for the last show of the “final tour.”
The two-hour car-smashing spectacular will include all the stunts Hanna has trotted out in the past six years at Port Angeles Speedway, with one notable exception: the Vertical Car Drop.
“It’s going to be incredible,” Hanna said of the stunt.
The seven-year Sequim resident got the idea for the car drop after watching Brian Carson, a stunt man out of Texas, pull off the stunt in a video.
He will recreate the tour de force Friday night at the Fairgrounds by lifting a car 150 feet in the air using a crane, then dropping it onto two stacks of catch cars with Port Angeles resident Dave Tangedahl inside.
“When he’s all set, we talk to Dave inside of the car [using walkie talkies] and we say Dave, ‘Hang on, here we go,’ and we pull the rope and it opens up the release catch on the hook and down comes the car,” Hanna said. “It probably will hit the catch cars at least 50 miles an hour.
“That’s like a head on crash.”
Little protection
The only thing protecting Tangedahl will be a mattress and special foam used by Oregon Aero in its planes for ejecting pilots.
It promises to be quite the ride for a 56-year-old man who spent five of the past six years filming Hanna’s daredevils when they performed at the Speedway.
Now, he’s getting in front of the camera.
“I got no real reason for doing it,” said Tangedahl, a former mechanic. “Just something to do I guess. I just got a wild hair.
“I started out by telling him I wanted to do the Flying Boardwall, and somehow it evolved into doing this.”
The Flying Boardwall will be left to another daredevil instead.
It is among a handful of other familiar stunts scheduled for the event, including the Outlaw T-Bone, Domino Crash, Slide for Life, Human Battering Ram, AllForm Welding Crash Roll Contest and the Death Defying Dive Bomber for the grand finale.
“Every time we do a stunt, even though it’s the same type of stunt, the car is different, the driver is different and the outcome is always unpredictable,” Hanna said.
“It’s always a separate experience.”
Anyone who attended Hanna’s final show at the Speedway in July could certainly attest to that.
Sequim resident Tyler Moore was slated to launch a 1978 Dodge four-door over the track’s infield pit shack before breaking his leg in seven places doing the Slide for Life.
That forced Dennis Sutton, also of Sequim, into action for the final stunt, which he pulled off in dramatic fashion before hundreds of fans at the Speedway
Sutton will return to pull off the dive bomber once again this Friday.
“It just shows that any stunt we do is inherently dangerous, and can go wrong no matter how much planning and preparation you do,” Hanna said of the July show.
Hanna knows that better than most.
He’s been involved in stunt shows since 1951, when he first joined the Joey Chitwood Auto Daredevils when he was 15 years old in Idaho.
Hanna — who went by the stage name Dusty Russell — has promoted, produced and performed in more than 300 shows during the past 40 years.
He has demolished more than 3,000 cars and jumped over 12 miles through the air doing various Dive Bombers with his World Champion Auto Daredevils.
He has said several times that Friday’s show at the fairgrounds will be his last.
“Most of those guys have come and gone,” from the original Auto Daredevils of the 1960s, Hanna said. “The only one still standing is me.”
At least for one more night.