Falcon Hell!

Reg ‘Crash’ Kavanagh and his team of Hollywood Hell Drivers were regular visitors to Australia from the mid-1950s onwards and always attracted huge crowds.
Ford was usually happy to lend the team a few promotional cars, but during the 1962 tour someone had the bright idea of asking Reg to demonstrate how tough the new XK series Falcons were. He was happy to oblige, in a car-crunching display that would have given The Dukes Of Hazzard a run for their money.
“He climbed in, didn’t even bother to put his helmet on or buckle up his seat belt, took a short run up to a 3 foot 6 inch (1.0 metre) high ramp and made the Falcon fly 30 feet (just over 9.0 metres) before landing, “claims the ad found by AMC reader Paul McCurley, in the April 1962 edition of Motor Manual magazine.
On his second jump, Kavanagh covered 60 feet (just over 18 metres) before landing. On his third and final attempt, he had the Falcon up to 65mph (104km/h) when he hit the ramp and flew a full 82 feet (25 metres) before landing. It was estimated that he was about eight feet (2.5 metres) above the ground at his highest point!
Reg was impressed. He and the Ford engineers then inspected the Falcon after the final jump and couldn’t find any signs of structural damage. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?
“There’s not another car in the Falcon class, or well out of the class for that matter, that would stand the tests I’ve put the 
Falcon through without a lot of modifications,” he said.
The ad looks impressive, but it probably didn’t prove much to the average motorist who didn’t drive over ramps at 65mph every day. Most would probably have suspected the Falcon had been modified in some way, such was the well-entrenched public perception of weakness in these cars.
Three years later, Ford was still so desperate to prove how tough its new Falcons really were – in real driving conditions - that they staged the audacious 70,000 Mile Durability Run at You Yangs and finally started to turn the Falcon’s poisonous perception around.
Even so, Ford got a lot of free publicity out of the Hell Drivers. The ‘Tank’ Fairlane visible in the background in the ad also featured on the cover of Pix magazine, along with model Betty Morgan. She wasn’t just a pretty face, though; Betty was also an active member of the Hell Drivers team and was noted for doing her stunts barefoot!
The new Fords were generally used for the less destructive stunts while ‘Crash’ and the gang used older cars for the spectacular stuff like smashing through walls of ice, or performing high-speed rollovers.
GM-H also got involved in these shows. The General supplied a series of current model EK Holdens to another team known as the Canadian Hell Drivers. Their speciality was driving along on only two wheels.